Other people are asking for more screen space, I'm asking for the option to have LESS! (and expand to fill the monitor) Why? It can make better use of the Pico-8 map space and improve the level design of your game!

There's a 64x64 game comp with some amazing entries, you can see them here.
https://itch.io/jam/lowrezjam2016
You can see more of the game pictured above here.
https://baku.itch.io/legend-of-xenia

This inspired me - I'm now converting my game to 64x64 as it made me realise I can finally fit the map of the entire game in if I restrict each screen to 64x64 and re-design the gameplay to suit!

This is more in line with the mentality of Pico-8, cut back the game to the core elements. The game is actually better for it - it's more compact, more challenging, more straight to the point, and no dead-space. I don't want to show it here yet because I want to keep it a surprise till there's something decent to show :)

I'm finding when I use "clip" that rather than crop the screen, I wish it could also expand to fill the available view, so I'm not playing the game in a small square in my monitor.

Hopefully this feature wouldn't be too involved to implement?

It already exists, though it's undocumented. poke(0x5f2c,3)

Go visit the hack mode cart, and dig into mode 3. (that's the first one to load by default)

If I'm not mistaken, it's exactly what you're looking for.

edit: aw, I was too slow thanks to making my example cart with some wiggling text in mode3. here it is anyway:

function _init()
 poke(0x5f2c,3)
 cls()
end

function _update()
 cls()
 cursor (26+abs(rnd(2)),29+abs(rnd(2)))
 print ("test")
end

You're kidding... I'm going to try this tonight!
Does this expand the screen so the coordinate system goes from 0 to 64 instead of 0 to 256, or expand the clipped area?

The former - it doubles the size of pixels and shows only the first 64 in each direction.

The clip() function sets a clipping rectangle for drawing, not viewing. It's for things like making sure you don't draw outside the area you're intending to modify.

Yeah the former would make the most sense. And yes I imagine clip is for things like having a gameplay area while you have a HUD area outside of that which you only change when you need to, like the old Dungeon crawler games.

Man this is awesome. It totally works. Thanks guys.

you could always build a game with borders, with the 64x64 box in the center if thats all it is.

Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing clip is for. Or not drawing characters over the status bars - you see that all the time in Game Boy fighting games. ... If you're crazy enough to play Game Boy fighting games anyway. Though they might actually be a good study for pico-8 devs, they had color restrictions arguably harsher than we do and used it well: http://loveconquersallgam.es/post/2350461718/fuck-the-super-game-boy-introduction

@FoobyDude that's what I had, it's like looking at a postage stamp. But as you can see from the previous posts, the feature I wanted already exists.

This is where I was looking, towards a fighting game project! :D Gotta remember where to find this.

keiya: Those TAKARA games were spot-on fun, though. That's where I was hoping to go with a project.