History

In this section, you can read exactly how Nintendo-x2.com originally started and which major events made the site to what it is today.

The beginning

In the year 2000, the founder of the sites, Dennis Stam, started following courses Informatics & Economics at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam (located in the Netherlands). As these courses included loads of online research and future online development, Dennis thought it would come in handy to learn himself the programming language used for websites: HTML. To do so, he planned a small website, yet defining the scope of the website remained.

Fortunately, one of Dennis' co-students and closest friends maintained one of Europe's largest independent Nintendo 64 and GameCube fansites: n64europe.com and cube-europe.com. This man, Tim Symons, recently acquired the just released Game Boy Advance and showed it off as the next best thing. Reason enough to dedicate a website to.

Geocities

The site was made and hosted on a small Geocities account under the name of GBAWorld. While the site was solely meant for learning the basics of HTML, the mere 3 visitors a day were reason to maintain the site a little longer. Four visitors came daily, five even and at the time there were ten loyal visitors, the time was right to decide what to do. These huge amounts of visitors deserved an advertisement-free website, do they not?

Tim Symons generously offered some free space on the Cube-Europe servers and threw in a subdomain of the n64europe.com domain. The site was transferred and faced a layout change, going from the dark black site to a blue-beige design: gba.n64europe.com was born. Still, the entire website was written in static HTML and updated near daily. In this period, the site's userbase grew to around 100 a day.

E3 2001

E3 2001 came along and opened Dennis' eyes. With these amounts of news and screenshots coming by in a mere three days, it's insane to edit the website's HTML code with every single newsarticle. It was time to explore new possibilities, gba.n64europe.com had to go dynamic.

The solution was found in the content management system NewsPro. The current design was tweaked slightly and NewsPro was installed on the server. From now on, it was possible to add and edit newsarticles straight from the web while the 'full story' feature became available too. A major step in the evolution of the site. In the meantime, the amounts of visitors kept growing and reached a few hundreds a day.

The year 2003

Nearly two years passed without much hassle and more and more people visited gba.n64europe.com. However, Cube-Europe was also growing and reached the limits of the server. Tim Symons decided to invest in a brand new sparkling dedicated server for the site, and hence why gba.n64europe.com had to move as well. Unfortunately this brought in the problem that the NewsPro application no longer functioned properly. A solution had to be found and fast! You can't keep a thousand visitors waiting because you've got a problem. At that point, Dennis started teaching himself basic PHP, a programming language used most on the Internet for dynamic websites.

PHP to the rescue!

While PHP is not a very hard language to learn, it can be tricky to implement an entire website including a content management system from scratch... for someone who has less experience with the language than a beginner.

PHP was learned, a framework constructed and a basis was laid out for improvement. Over the years, this very same PHP-driven framework was extended and altered to bring you what you see before you now. The comments-system, search-functionalities, the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Friendship program, all of these got implemented throughout the last few years and added to the site.

On to DS-x2.com

In 2005, Tim Symons got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: move to Germany and get a job at Nintendo of Europe. And that's exactly what he did. Unfortunately the job meant that he no longer was allowed to maintain Cube-Europe.com. The site was transferred to the Advanced Media Network, meaning there was no more room for gba.n64europe.com. However, the domainname n64europe.com got transferred as well, meaning to more gba.n64europe.com anymore either.

A new server to host the site was sought and found. A domain had to be registered, which became the nowadays familiar DS-x2.com. The site was renamed and moved once more.

One more move

In less than a year, DS-x2.com grew out of its bounds. The new server only allowed for a certain amount of activity and DS-x2.com was nearing those limits rapidly. With E3 2006 less than a month away, we had to act fast. A new server was hired and got dedicated to DS-x2.com (and after that: Wii-x2.com). At the time of writing (December 2006), the limits of this new server are far from reached.

The future

The Internet keeps changing, our userbase keeps expanding and we keep reaching for higher and higher standards. This means we're far from finished and that's a good thing, as we're still having fun with this overgrown hobby-project.