What the heck is a "Ducking Pull"??????
Have you ever played
Punch-Out!! (1984), the arcade version (
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out [1987] for the NES was based on it)? In late '84 or early '85, Nintendo released a sequel to PO called
Super Punch-Out!! (not to be confused with the 1994 SNES game of the same title). It was offered as a conversion kit for existing PO cabinets. It was nearly the same game as PO, but it had new opponents and it added the ability to "duck" an attack, rather than just being able to dodge left and right.
For the ducking function, the conversion kit included a new joystick which added a 5th microswitch so that when you pulled the joystick straight up (toward the sky), it tripped the 5th switch. They also included the little red "Ducking Pull" sticker which was to be applied on the existing PO control panel around the base of the joystick. It was reverse screen printed on clear 7 mil Lexan, the same as the control panel overlay itself.
There is only one original unapplied NOS "Ducking Pull" sticker in existence that anyone knows about, and the owner of it scanned it in so it could be reproduced for others that wanted to restore their SPO machine. A similar situation existed with the "Super" sideart decal (also for SPO), except in this case, I had the only known unapplied NOS original. That one was tricky to vectorize, because it has curved halftone gradients (making a gradient in Illustrator is easy; making it conform to an exact curve and outer shape is not so easy).
Yeah even having to hand draw the text its about 15 to 20 minutes of hand work with the pen tool.
It depends on how accurate you want to be. Uniform "typeface" style text like that can be tricky to get just right (i.e., perfectly follow the curves and lines of the original, plus have perfectly smooth transitions on every single achor point and proper symmetry). I don't remember how long it took me exactly; maybe an hour (less time than I spent futily looking for a matching font). I could trace all those letters in like 5 minutes and have it be "close enough for government work", but I'm somewhat of a perfectionist.
The funny thing is; the most time-consuming part of doing that particular file wasn't in the tracing at all; it was determining the exact sizes and positions of the holes which would be die-cut. Even being off by a small fraction of an inch would mean that the reproductions would not line up correctly with the existing holes in the steel PO control panels.
Auto trace anything is just not going to help with a design like that.
Exactly, and most vector-style art is like that; i.e., lots of straight lines and long smooth curves; and that is the type of art where errors are the most obvious.