The Transistor can take care of Aura monitoring and other things like that, but a Scroll is essentially still a smartphone, and the code for that is 90% of the problem. Besides, imagine if he took a call and held his sword up to his ear, he'd look mad.
Hodgepodge
Jaune was frustrated. The truth of the matter was, getting the Transistor onto his home's network connection wasn't really that difficult. The sensory capabilities of it were leagues greater than what was needed to pick up on the signal, and with the Antenna() function he'd written, emitting radio waves of its own was simple enough. With the more widespread scroll network, he'd need a unique, registered identification key to connect, and he didn't have one of those. Theoretically, he could disassemble his scroll and use that one, but a). that was illegal, and b). his mom would kill him if he broke it. But for just his house's Wi-Fi, that wasn't necessary at all.
Some sleepless nights tinkering with handshake protocols and hey presto, data exchange! Except it wasn't that simple. Data without interpretation is gibberish, after all.
Text was... doable. There were only five text protocols in widespread use (one for each kingdom, except for Atlas, where the older variant was incompatible with the new one, but still appeared in a lot of legacy documents), and each being relatively simple, he got into the rhythm of the problem and had them all hashed out by the end of the week.
Combine that with some quick edits to copies of his existing Display() and Keyboard() functions, used to input function data to the Transistor, and he had a working browser... that could only read and display plaintext.
On the plus side, the CCT network had a
lot of plaintext data on it - especially on older or academic sites. On the other hand, images, audio, and proprietary file formats were very much the lifeblood of more... modern online culture. To really experience the network, he needed
more.
And so, the night he'd completed his initial browser project, Jaune looked up the code for a video codec. He immediately ditched the project for another eight months, working on the code for Jaunt() instead - that was a
much neater, less pointlessly convoluted, and overall simpler project, he felt. The inner workings of video were an absolute
nightmare, and the most common video services didn't even have a shared common standard... so he'd have to code for playback from each one separately.
Still, soon enough, he found himself desiring the ability to click through web pages with his mind. This time, having learned his lesson, he was
much less ambitious - he modded his scroll to physically fork the user input and display data streams, then kitbashed a connection to the Transistor - a window to display what his scrolls screen would normally show, and a function to turn his mental commands into simulated finger swipes.
ScreenCopy() and FakeInput() were a lot less
elegant than building his own browser, but he could still telepathically scroll down a webpage he could see superimposed over the corner of his vision, and that was good enough for him. Who
cared if it was just a replica of what his scroll would be showing if the screen wasn't physically disabled, while it did all the processing?
Building a working browser? Doable. Getting it to show basic pictures and gifs? A fair amount of work, but still
possible. Full video/audio playback? Would take a stupid amount of work. Making .docx / .pdf equivalents readable, over hundreds and hundreds of file types? Madness inducing.
Much, much easier to build a display mirror and fake touch input stream for his scroll, so he can control it with the Transistor - especially if he's willing to mod the scroll. What he loses in processing power, he makes up for in delegating the work of making everything compatable to
people who aren't him.
