I am a fan of old computer games.
In fact I think I am a fan of many things that are old. Music, movies, you name it.
One day I had an idea, what if I could convert the old graphics with huge pixels into something modern that will look great as display sizes and resolutions increase.
I started then working on a program that would convert a bitmap image into vector graphics. There were a few programs that did mostly the same thing (some with scary results). Nevertheless I started working on my own.
The approach was to start with a very rough pixel approximation and then use some sort of physical simulation (edges behave like elastic blades that nevertheless do not conserve length) to get it to look more round. The results are interesting, though I didn't implement searching for corners and everything is rounded.
It uses a nice heuristic to figure out which pixels belong to which object. That part worked better than the vectorizer in Flash, I was really happy with the result. I never managed to get around to export the results in some usable format.
Application and source code can be found in the attachments.