Ah, those look nice, at least in that size. Well, the knights' eyes look strange in XChu.png, but fine in Lion1.png. Or are the "knights" in XChu actually fairy pieces that have different looking eyes on purpose?
The challenge with the original pixmap pieces was to tweak the smaller sizes to look good, as Metafont didn't do a good job of that (well, maybe the Metafont program was missing "hinting"-style information that would have made them look better), and of course the pieces weren't anti-aliased. The 21x21-pixel "tiny" size needed extensive editing. With today's typically much bigger screens, and anti-aliasing, I imagine SVG looks great for sizes people actually use.