Depixelizing Pixel Art may work even better for some types of images: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/
"The algorithm extracts a smooth, resolution-independent vector representation from the image, which enables magnifying the results by an arbitrary amount without image degradation."
I tried HQX and the results are impressive! I have abandonned the Python tool because the installation is tedious but this one is very straightforward.