That's a collection of rom hacks, essentially. You only get to play chunks of the original games with challenges or odd effects not found in the original to keep it interesting. If you want to play the whole game through you have to buy it separately, IF it's available on the e-shop. And frankly the NES Remix collection is kinda crap even for what it is. Uninspired modifications and dull as dishwater tasks to complete. There are better fan mods out there that they should have looked to for inspiration.
So you're saying it's like RAID, you take a stack of unreliable hard drives and through the power of redundancy you make a reliable data set that's more than the sum of its parts. Except in this case Amazon is just providing you the hard drives and you have to do the RAID on your own? It seems every time I hear about cloud computing the problem domain it actually solves seems to get smaller and smaller.
if it is something that makes them happy for even a moment, doesn't cause you or anyone else physical harm why is that bad?
While it's not "harm", it is annoying that the best game companies are chasing new and interesting ways to attract whales to buy oodles of virtual trinkets instead of trying to make the best gameplay they know how to. The market is speaking loud and clear and I disagree with them. I am basically resigned to the inevitability that the gaming future will be streaming, games-as-a-service, gachapon-loot-crate, microtransaction, online-only, time limited mobile games tied to social features. And I don't like it. I will support the companies not doing this for as long as they can hold out, but sooner or later everyone folds. Even Nintendo jumped on the DLC/season pass bandwagon.
I can't watch the video right now so apologies if this is all explained, but I don't see why the summary makes it sound so complicated. The NES PPU gets its tile data from ROM on the cart. Most of the NES library uses a mapper that supports replacing this ROM with an electrically compatible RAM setup. More complicated mappers write data to this RAM on behalf of the game code to provide support for features the NES can't do.
He could obviously just take this approach to its logical conclusion and dump the emulated buffer from the Pi in NES tile format in a RAM buffer the way NES mappers already do.
The only reason I can see to do what he's doing is to subvert the limitations on colours per tile to get the output closer to the SNES. But given the absurd amount of noise a stable lower colour display using the simple, obvious way would be better than having to explain to people that if they squint really hard they can see more colours behind the noise than the NES could really display at once.
And "the noise is caused by guessing" doesn't entirely fly. Nintendo would fail any game submission that wrote to the PPU registers outside of vblank because the NES PPU was highly unstable and very easy to throw off. To me it looks more like what happens when hot shit coders tried to micromanage the PPU to get fancy graphical effects, then spent hours trying to stop the output from looking like something was failing very badly before giving up and having to be satisfied with their smooth 8-way scroller without mid-scanline effects.
I've never tried but the specs make it impossible. The Pi only has ethernet over USB, that onboard port isn't wired to any high speed bus other than USB 2.0. So you are limited to whatever you can do bi-directionally on USB2 meaning maybe 200mbit/s, in theory. That's not fast enough for cable or fibre connections.
Sure, but given that every platform is hacked in a matter of months,
They aren't as such. Usually they hold out for years and years. It depends on your perspective.
For the most part these hacks are too difficult for the average user and it usually takes a year or so before enough of the hassle has been ironed out that even the technically inclined can claim it's convenient to use. Up until recently everything required a hardware device. The earlier cart based consoles required disc copiers, CD consoles needed a soldered in mod chip, the DS needed special flash carts that could only be produced once the key mechanism was discovered to be faulty. The PSP was unique in that it could be done entirely in software (at first) though it did require specific games that may not have been easy to obtain. The 360 required a JTAG device to write custom firmware onto the DVD drive...
Anyway, my point is that whilst they are technically cracked within a year or so, it's not like cracking DRM on a PC release. Utilising the hacks on consoles generally required technical know-how, a supply of the bit of hardware you needed and often times the right motherboard revision or the right firmware. Most people didn't have access to any of that. You'll find clusters of it, where there's someone nearby that people use, but if they don't have Steve in the dodgy mobile phone repair shop the machine remains essentially unhacked.
You have a secondary problem where you get fake carts. The GBA and DS were both marred by this problem. You go looking for a specific game and you get something that looks the part only to notice that the plastic isn't quite right, the label is poor, and the PCB puts extra strain on the pins hastening the death of the slot and the developer gets not a single cent out of your purchase.
I'd argue that this is worse than piracy. These go after customers who wanted to give developers money and instead wound up funding a pirate cloner. It basically stopped me buying DS games.
There are parts of the system that you can't modify with sudo. Right now it's largely irrelevant as it's all stuff even power users are unlikely to want to touch, but they could easily extend it if they want to nerf the unix-y parts.
Also, no problems with getting a board that will work with the new CPUs in theory... but is unable to boot up with a new CPU until the BIOS is updated... but how do you update the BIOS if you don't have an older CPU to boot the board and run the update utility?
Happens with intel sockets too. The board I'm using now technically supports ivy bridge but only with a firmware upgrade. The board you buy during the transition could easily be old stock. A decent reseller would know to pick the new stock if you buy a new CPU at the same time, but amazon you get what the computer says to pick.
Amazon's competition nuked themselves with their inadequacy. All Amazon did was spot the weaknesses (which were pretty obvious) and exploit them.
No, what Amazon did was figure out that they didn't need to make profit so long as they kept investing in new technology that they could maybe sell eventually. They now make so much money on cloud computing and related services that they don't give a crap about profit in their retail side. They are walmarting the entire retail business model safe in the knowledge that everyone else is going to go broke long before they do trying to compete.
People who have never worked in a small retail business don't understand the business model. You don't "compete" with lower prices, that's just a race to the bottom with everyone dying a slow death. Including the manufacturers who now have a thoroughly devalued product that they can't wholesale.
The teleporting is actually what stopped me from buying it. I want to walk, run and fly around in VR, I don't want to warp between fixed cameras.
The motion sickness issue that lots of people suffer from using VR is not easy to solve. With 3D TVs there are some fancy demos that show pretty well what you can get out of stereoscopic displays. Nothing revolutionary but cool. However from motion sickness, headaches and fatigue that people self report the studios get skittish and nerf it. End result cinematic 3D has very little depth and the result is more like some cardboard cutouts in a shoebox. And I'm not talking about post-facto extruded movies, even the few video games with 3D stereo built in have ride all virtual depth even at maximum. The 3 that let you set a much larger maximum depth actually do look amazing and show what you could really be using.
VR headsets, same problem. The more people reported motion sickness, the less impressive the games seemed to get until the final release where we got flattened depth and point warping.
Now I'm waiting for 4K 3D where that will fix the resolution issue.
LG have 4K TVs with passive 3D that sidesteps the half resolution issue for 1080p 3D, however there is no 4K 3D spec and likely never will be. When designing the 4K blu-ray spec they purposefully left it out. I doubt you'll see 4K stereoscopic 3D that isn't Half-SBS for this reason if you see any 4K 3D ever.
For me, 3D failed because thanks to complaints about nausea and headaches, studios got completely gutless with the content. The depth of the 3D image is practically non-existant. Gives the impression of staring into a shallow shoebox diorama.
The only good 3D from a TV I have ever experienced was Tomb Raider 2013 on the PC an only because you could dial the 3D intensity up to silly levels. Meant that looking from Lara to the ground 100ft below required a proper adjustment of your eyes and it was much much more effective than anything I have ever seen in video. Sadly it made it detrimental to the gameplay, but hey ho it was fun and I persevered for the whole game like that. But there are very few 3D stereoscopic games without resorting to 3D hacks and pretty much none of those stretch the field of view even a tenth of what TR did.
The important distinction is that rarely do the expanded functions actually affect the consumer. Basically nothing targeted the DSi specs except for some camera related features tacked on to a few games, very few games used the N64 ram and those that did just provided a low framerate high res mode that you'd probably turn off again. DK64, Conker's being the notable exceptions that suffered in the market for loads of reasons not just that.
The PSP revisions didn't have a faster CPU, the original was always capable of 333 it was just disallowed by the SDK at the time largely due to battery drain. Then as the machine was in its twilight years they let developers use 333, and this still worked on the PSP1000. People with hacked firmware got to use the toggle first, useful for running emulators. The extra ram was used for the OS and as a disk cache so that the drive could sleep longer extending battery life, it wasn't available for games (except homebrew).
The N3DS has very little targeted to it as well. The GBC was essentially a new console.
My point largely is that console revisions rarely affect the consumer, whereas on PC your GTX660 could cause you problems that a 960 won't. Or a 1060 will and the 480 won't. On the PC there's too many options that are "current" that developers have to deal with. This leads to extended development times and excessive patching when you realise that too many of your customers are using fast enough but old CPUs that don't have SSE4.x so you have to support more code paths and more testing. Compared to the list of things a PC developer has to target, having a couple of known tiers for a single console is a dream.
I might be completely wrong, but I think this is a case of reviewers in a rush. PCIe spec is 75W draw max, 6 pin connector is 75W max therefore 150W max draw for this card, right? Well, the one graph that seems to be copied everywhere showed 164W draw. First, assuming that the review site knows what they are doing and that their measurement tool isn't mistaken, then this requires that either the mobo or the 6pin connector is able to SUPPLY out of spec power. Now, this IS a feature on high end gaming motherboards which nVidia partners used to good effect on the 980ti to boost the card past the power limit ceiling. You had to configure your system to ignore the specs. Makes me think that they simply whacked this card in and hit go on a mobo designed to feed a 980ti overclocked and the 480 got the same benefit.
I'm wondering if I stick this in my machine which can't do this I'd wind up with lower scores.
Or quite probably MSI afterburner will get a patch soon that fixes the bad read.
these only exist because windows doesn't provide a centralised update system for applications to hook into.
Microsoft is afraid that if they did provide that, that when things go wrong with downloads via that channel, that people will blame Microsoft, not the vendor.
We blame microsoft for everything as it stands. How many windows problems can actually be traced back to 3rd party drivers and utilities? Personally I think that any small increase in backlash is just their cross to bear.
I believe it was EA that discovered that (their) games with demos sold poorer in the opening week than games released without. And it seems every game from EA, Activision and Ubisoft have "pre-order bonuses" that entice gamers to not wait for critical reviews. It is a scummy industry and it only seems to get worse.
Apparently I'm the only one on earth who doesn't like multi-player and has zero interest in playing a game with a bunch of random strangers on the Internet
Oh, you are definitely NOT the only one. The vast majority of gamers play single player games, some of which dabble in multi-player. It's just that the MP communities are the loudest voices. They are the ones that have to come together to play so naturally they will form a community where a single player gamer is unlikely to. Games like Titanfall or Destiny had MASSIVE marketing budgets so they seem more indicative of the market than they are. In both cases they haven't been hugely popular. That's not to say they are bad, far from it, if you have an interest in that type of gameplay you will probably like them, but the percentage of the market that is seems to be massively oversold. Personally I attribute Titanfall's lack of success to its pure multiplayer focus. Last I checked Call of Duty and Battlefield have more players that don't play online than ones that do.
All I ever get is hot, uncomfortable, sore and annoyed.
I think that's true of everyone it's just that the morning gym types get pleasure from rubbing others noses in it. The "I cycled to work this morning" and "I did X in the gym this morning" folk seem to spend all day with lower productivity and tend to be more prone to moodiness. The staff I work with were better before their health kick. I'd prefer they waited until after work, makes my job more pleasant.
Most of the new arcade machines are mostly regular PCs running stripped down windows installs. Cheap hardware, well documented development environment. Sadly old arcade machine mentality means replacing commodity parts with other commodity parts is usually impossible.
I expect lots of small companies are in the same boat I am. I have 7 perfectly working CS4 installations, but now I need an 8th. Since backwards compatibility is a crapshoot that could burn you at the worst possible time I have to upgrade everyone to Creative Cloud just to get that 8th license. I could try and ebay a copy of CS4 but since licenses are not transferrable, legally that's no better than pirating.
My solution so far is to take one license from my own machine since I don't need it much and am more likely to do stuff with ImageMagick than start PS. But that only buys me time. If I can't get a solid migration plan soon I'll be stuck paying £5k+ a YEAR just to use Adobe's glitchy shit.
Because we're still living in the '50s where every household has only one tv.
So many parents force the consoles to be in the main room, because "it's for the family" or "we don't allow the children to have TVs of their own". I consider it a form of child abuse, but it's common.
Can these Samsung Smart TVs be made to ignore all the convergence stuff and just be a monitor?
Last I checked, you needed a network connection for this stuff. So all you need to do is... not plug in the network cable. Or configure the wifi.
So just use it as a TV and you're golden.
You know what's funny? I have a Samsung 40" series 6 that I can't remember the model number of - really early smart TV that's not worth the effort to use as one so I didn't bother to hook up the ethernet when I moved. At least once a month it would lock up, as in picture and sound still going, but the UI would either stop responding, or respond but not do anything requiring a hard power off to fix. Since hooking up the ethernet again it hasn't done that in nearly a year. Tin foil hats at the ready...
Slashdot Mirror
That's a collection of rom hacks, essentially. You only get to play chunks of the original games with challenges or odd effects not found in the original to keep it interesting. If you want to play the whole game through you have to buy it separately, IF it's available on the e-shop. And frankly the NES Remix collection is kinda crap even for what it is. Uninspired modifications and dull as dishwater tasks to complete. There are better fan mods out there that they should have looked to for inspiration.
Amazon's hardware isn't HA, your solution is.
So you're saying it's like RAID, you take a stack of unreliable hard drives and through the power of redundancy you make a reliable data set that's more than the sum of its parts. Except in this case Amazon is just providing you the hard drives and you have to do the RAID on your own? It seems every time I hear about cloud computing the problem domain it actually solves seems to get smaller and smaller.
if it is something that makes them happy for even a moment, doesn't cause you or anyone else physical harm why is that bad?
While it's not "harm", it is annoying that the best game companies are chasing new and interesting ways to attract whales to buy oodles of virtual trinkets instead of trying to make the best gameplay they know how to. The market is speaking loud and clear and I disagree with them. I am basically resigned to the inevitability that the gaming future will be streaming, games-as-a-service, gachapon-loot-crate, microtransaction, online-only, time limited mobile games tied to social features. And I don't like it. I will support the companies not doing this for as long as they can hold out, but sooner or later everyone folds. Even Nintendo jumped on the DLC/season pass bandwagon.
I can't watch the video right now so apologies if this is all explained, but I don't see why the summary makes it sound so complicated. The NES PPU gets its tile data from ROM on the cart. Most of the NES library uses a mapper that supports replacing this ROM with an electrically compatible RAM setup. More complicated mappers write data to this RAM on behalf of the game code to provide support for features the NES can't do.
He could obviously just take this approach to its logical conclusion and dump the emulated buffer from the Pi in NES tile format in a RAM buffer the way NES mappers already do.
The only reason I can see to do what he's doing is to subvert the limitations on colours per tile to get the output closer to the SNES. But given the absurd amount of noise a stable lower colour display using the simple, obvious way would be better than having to explain to people that if they squint really hard they can see more colours behind the noise than the NES could really display at once.
And "the noise is caused by guessing" doesn't entirely fly. Nintendo would fail any game submission that wrote to the PPU registers outside of vblank because the NES PPU was highly unstable and very easy to throw off. To me it looks more like what happens when hot shit coders tried to micromanage the PPU to get fancy graphical effects, then spent hours trying to stop the output from looking like something was failing very badly before giving up and having to be satisfied with their smooth 8-way scroller without mid-scanline effects.
I've never tried but the specs make it impossible. The Pi only has ethernet over USB, that onboard port isn't wired to any high speed bus other than USB 2.0. So you are limited to whatever you can do bi-directionally on USB2 meaning maybe 200mbit/s, in theory. That's not fast enough for cable or fibre connections.
Sure, but given that every platform is hacked in a matter of months,
They aren't as such. Usually they hold out for years and years. It depends on your perspective.
For the most part these hacks are too difficult for the average user and it usually takes a year or so before enough of the hassle has been ironed out that even the technically inclined can claim it's convenient to use. Up until recently everything required a hardware device. The earlier cart based consoles required disc copiers, CD consoles needed a soldered in mod chip, the DS needed special flash carts that could only be produced once the key mechanism was discovered to be faulty. The PSP was unique in that it could be done entirely in software (at first) though it did require specific games that may not have been easy to obtain. The 360 required a JTAG device to write custom firmware onto the DVD drive...
Anyway, my point is that whilst they are technically cracked within a year or so, it's not like cracking DRM on a PC release. Utilising the hacks on consoles generally required technical know-how, a supply of the bit of hardware you needed and often times the right motherboard revision or the right firmware. Most people didn't have access to any of that. You'll find clusters of it, where there's someone nearby that people use, but if they don't have Steve in the dodgy mobile phone repair shop the machine remains essentially unhacked.
You have a secondary problem where you get fake carts. The GBA and DS were both marred by this problem. You go looking for a specific game and you get something that looks the part only to notice that the plastic isn't quite right, the label is poor, and the PCB puts extra strain on the pins hastening the death of the slot and the developer gets not a single cent out of your purchase.
I'd argue that this is worse than piracy. These go after customers who wanted to give developers money and instead wound up funding a pirate cloner. It basically stopped me buying DS games.
There are parts of the system that you can't modify with sudo. Right now it's largely irrelevant as it's all stuff even power users are unlikely to want to touch, but they could easily extend it if they want to nerf the unix-y parts.
Also, no problems with getting a board that will work with the new CPUs in theory... but is unable to boot up with a new CPU until the BIOS is updated... but how do you update the BIOS if you don't have an older CPU to boot the board and run the update utility?
Happens with intel sockets too. The board I'm using now technically supports ivy bridge but only with a firmware upgrade. The board you buy during the transition could easily be old stock. A decent reseller would know to pick the new stock if you buy a new CPU at the same time, but amazon you get what the computer says to pick.
Amazon's competition nuked themselves with their inadequacy. All Amazon did was spot the weaknesses (which were pretty obvious) and exploit them.
No, what Amazon did was figure out that they didn't need to make profit so long as they kept investing in new technology that they could maybe sell eventually. They now make so much money on cloud computing and related services that they don't give a crap about profit in their retail side. They are walmarting the entire retail business model safe in the knowledge that everyone else is going to go broke long before they do trying to compete.
People who have never worked in a small retail business don't understand the business model. You don't "compete" with lower prices, that's just a race to the bottom with everyone dying a slow death. Including the manufacturers who now have a thoroughly devalued product that they can't wholesale.
The teleporting is actually what stopped me from buying it. I want to walk, run and fly around in VR, I don't want to warp between fixed cameras.
The motion sickness issue that lots of people suffer from using VR is not easy to solve. With 3D TVs there are some fancy demos that show pretty well what you can get out of stereoscopic displays. Nothing revolutionary but cool. However from motion sickness, headaches and fatigue that people self report the studios get skittish and nerf it. End result cinematic 3D has very little depth and the result is more like some cardboard cutouts in a shoebox. And I'm not talking about post-facto extruded movies, even the few video games with 3D stereo built in have ride all virtual depth even at maximum. The 3 that let you set a much larger maximum depth actually do look amazing and show what you could really be using.
VR headsets, same problem. The more people reported motion sickness, the less impressive the games seemed to get until the final release where we got flattened depth and point warping.
I think you're forgetting all the servers.
I have never disagreed with someone so hard in my life as you right now. Kudos.
Now I'm waiting for 4K 3D where that will fix the resolution issue.
LG have 4K TVs with passive 3D that sidesteps the half resolution issue for 1080p 3D, however there is no 4K 3D spec and likely never will be. When designing the 4K blu-ray spec they purposefully left it out. I doubt you'll see 4K stereoscopic 3D that isn't Half-SBS for this reason if you see any 4K 3D ever.
For me, 3D failed because thanks to complaints about nausea and headaches, studios got completely gutless with the content. The depth of the 3D image is practically non-existant. Gives the impression of staring into a shallow shoebox diorama.
The only good 3D from a TV I have ever experienced was Tomb Raider 2013 on the PC an only because you could dial the 3D intensity up to silly levels. Meant that looking from Lara to the ground 100ft below required a proper adjustment of your eyes and it was much much more effective than anything I have ever seen in video. Sadly it made it detrimental to the gameplay, but hey ho it was fun and I persevered for the whole game like that. But there are very few 3D stereoscopic games without resorting to 3D hacks and pretty much none of those stretch the field of view even a tenth of what TR did.
The important distinction is that rarely do the expanded functions actually affect the consumer. Basically nothing targeted the DSi specs except for some camera related features tacked on to a few games, very few games used the N64 ram and those that did just provided a low framerate high res mode that you'd probably turn off again. DK64, Conker's being the notable exceptions that suffered in the market for loads of reasons not just that. The PSP revisions didn't have a faster CPU, the original was always capable of 333 it was just disallowed by the SDK at the time largely due to battery drain. Then as the machine was in its twilight years they let developers use 333, and this still worked on the PSP1000. People with hacked firmware got to use the toggle first, useful for running emulators. The extra ram was used for the OS and as a disk cache so that the drive could sleep longer extending battery life, it wasn't available for games (except homebrew). The N3DS has very little targeted to it as well. The GBC was essentially a new console. My point largely is that console revisions rarely affect the consumer, whereas on PC your GTX660 could cause you problems that a 960 won't. Or a 1060 will and the 480 won't. On the PC there's too many options that are "current" that developers have to deal with. This leads to extended development times and excessive patching when you realise that too many of your customers are using fast enough but old CPUs that don't have SSE4.x so you have to support more code paths and more testing. Compared to the list of things a PC developer has to target, having a couple of known tiers for a single console is a dream.
I might be completely wrong, but I think this is a case of reviewers in a rush. PCIe spec is 75W draw max, 6 pin connector is 75W max therefore 150W max draw for this card, right? Well, the one graph that seems to be copied everywhere showed 164W draw. First, assuming that the review site knows what they are doing and that their measurement tool isn't mistaken, then this requires that either the mobo or the 6pin connector is able to SUPPLY out of spec power. Now, this IS a feature on high end gaming motherboards which nVidia partners used to good effect on the 980ti to boost the card past the power limit ceiling. You had to configure your system to ignore the specs. Makes me think that they simply whacked this card in and hit go on a mobo designed to feed a 980ti overclocked and the 480 got the same benefit.
I'm wondering if I stick this in my machine which can't do this I'd wind up with lower scores.
Or quite probably MSI afterburner will get a patch soon that fixes the bad read.
these only exist because windows doesn't provide a centralised update system for applications to hook into.
Microsoft is afraid that if they did provide that, that when things go wrong with downloads via that channel, that people will blame Microsoft, not the vendor.
We blame microsoft for everything as it stands. How many windows problems can actually be traced back to 3rd party drivers and utilities? Personally I think that any small increase in backlash is just their cross to bear.
I believe it was EA that discovered that (their) games with demos sold poorer in the opening week than games released without. And it seems every game from EA, Activision and Ubisoft have "pre-order bonuses" that entice gamers to not wait for critical reviews. It is a scummy industry and it only seems to get worse.
Apparently I'm the only one on earth who doesn't like multi-player and has zero interest in playing a game with a bunch of random strangers on the Internet
Oh, you are definitely NOT the only one. The vast majority of gamers play single player games, some of which dabble in multi-player. It's just that the MP communities are the loudest voices. They are the ones that have to come together to play so naturally they will form a community where a single player gamer is unlikely to. Games like Titanfall or Destiny had MASSIVE marketing budgets so they seem more indicative of the market than they are. In both cases they haven't been hugely popular. That's not to say they are bad, far from it, if you have an interest in that type of gameplay you will probably like them, but the percentage of the market that is seems to be massively oversold. Personally I attribute Titanfall's lack of success to its pure multiplayer focus. Last I checked Call of Duty and Battlefield have more players that don't play online than ones that do.
What kind of lunatic plays his Game Boy games on an emulated adapter for a different console entirely instead of just using a Game Boy emulator?!
Someone who wants to see the Super GameBoy enhanced features some games had.
All I ever get is hot, uncomfortable, sore and annoyed.
I think that's true of everyone it's just that the morning gym types get pleasure from rubbing others noses in it. The "I cycled to work this morning" and "I did X in the gym this morning" folk seem to spend all day with lower productivity and tend to be more prone to moodiness. The staff I work with were better before their health kick. I'd prefer they waited until after work, makes my job more pleasant.
Most of the new arcade machines are mostly regular PCs running stripped down windows installs. Cheap hardware, well documented development environment. Sadly old arcade machine mentality means replacing commodity parts with other commodity parts is usually impossible.
I expect lots of small companies are in the same boat I am. I have 7 perfectly working CS4 installations, but now I need an 8th. Since backwards compatibility is a crapshoot that could burn you at the worst possible time I have to upgrade everyone to Creative Cloud just to get that 8th license. I could try and ebay a copy of CS4 but since licenses are not transferrable, legally that's no better than pirating. My solution so far is to take one license from my own machine since I don't need it much and am more likely to do stuff with ImageMagick than start PS. But that only buys me time. If I can't get a solid migration plan soon I'll be stuck paying £5k+ a YEAR just to use Adobe's glitchy shit.
Because we're still living in the '50s where every household has only one tv.
So many parents force the consoles to be in the main room, because "it's for the family" or "we don't allow the children to have TVs of their own". I consider it a form of child abuse, but it's common.
Last I checked, you needed a network connection for this stuff. So all you need to do is... not plug in the network cable. Or configure the wifi.
So just use it as a TV and you're golden.
You know what's funny? I have a Samsung 40" series 6 that I can't remember the model number of - really early smart TV that's not worth the effort to use as one so I didn't bother to hook up the ethernet when I moved. At least once a month it would lock up, as in picture and sound still going, but the UI would either stop responding, or respond but not do anything requiring a hard power off to fix. Since hooking up the ethernet again it hasn't done that in nearly a year. Tin foil hats at the ready...