picojpeg on a Tandy Color Computer 3 (6809 processor)

I've gotten my picojpeg.c module decoding JPEG images on the (almost) 30 year old CoCo 3. Here's my first 16x16 decoded image on a 6809 CPU. (For all I know, it could be the first JPEG to be decoded on this particular CPU.) The upper nibble of the red component was written to each character of the default low-res 32x16 text screen. It's currently damn ugly, but this is good enough to verify the pixels are being decoded in this test image.

For the compiler, I'm using gcc6809, compiled under Ubuntu 13.10 (with several evil workarounds to get the compiler to build at all), ToolShed to convert the .bin file to a CoCo .dsk image file (running via Wine), and DriveWire 4 (running on another machine with Win7) to transfer the .dsk file to the CoCo. The .dsk image also has a small MS BASIC program to LOADM the .bin file and EXEC it at the right start address.

Unfortunately, I can't run it again without restarting the machine and booting up DriveWire again -- no idea why yet. If I hit reset and EXEC the decoder again it does something but the output image is bogus. This process is terribly slow because after restarting the machine I must CLOADM the DriveWire 4 client over the cassette port (hooked up to my PC's sound output). The DriveWire booting process uses Winamp to play back the cassette sound file!

 The test JPEG, enlarged by 8x and converted to PNG:

The next step is to figure out why I can't restart it without shutting down, and then switch it over to a CoCo 3 16-color graphics mode and add some sort of dithered output. After that comes lots of 6809 specific optimization. It'll still be slow as molasses, even after tuning it, but it's fun anyway.

Figuring out how to build gcc6809 under Ubuntu 13.10, then to get this sucker to output CoCo compatible .bin files was a pain. Figuring out how to enable gcc compiler optimizations without causing aslink to core dump was even more fun. I'll post all the things I had to do soon. It's pretty cool to have a modern C compiler capable of targeting the machine you started with..