MAMEWorld Forums - MAME Artwork: Official

I believe Illustrator CS2 was the first AI with the "Live Trace" feature, which is similar to the old Adobe Streamline tracing program. However, ANY tracing program, even if you start with a very sharp and high-contrast high-resolution raster image, is going to introduce some degree of inaccuracy, especially around corners of objects, which it often tends to change to radiused turns. And if the raster image includes halftones or shading, it doesn't handle that well at all, in my experience at least.

Your best bet for 99% of AI work is in mastering the Pen tool. I create artwork for screenprinting every day, and unless the customer isn't picky, I spend almost as much time revising a vector image made with Live Trace as I would have if I had created it from scratch.