Ah, sometimes research actually can cross over to hobby. I don't have access to this, but I'll look to try and find it. Not for the purists, of course, but creating a vectorized version of an 8-bit pixel image that's smoothed out would be awesome for blowing up art for cps, marquees, and sideart.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2385811,00.asp 