multiplayer doom guide

How to play Classic DooM multiplayer

First, you need the iWads (the base files that contain all the game's data: sprites, code, maps, etc.) The one you will need the most is doom2.wad. You can get doom2.wad the easiest (and you can get all the other DooM iwads) by buying the Doom Classic Complete collection on Steam. You can get that here: https://store.steampowered.com/sub/18397/

If you don't want to spend 15 bucks for all of them, or 5 bucks for DooM 2, you can use Freedoom, which is a free version of "doom" licensed under the whatever. It's completely legal, and while it doesn't let you play classic maps or see the classic sprites and hear the classic music, it contains all of the resources you need to play custom maps. You can get that here: https://freedoom.github.io/download.html

While Freedoom is ok, and free, I definitely recommend either buying Doom 2 on steam, or using your old floppies to get the iWad (you may need to run a patcher to get it to the right version.)

After you get your iwads, you'll want the most popular source port that has the widest range of compatibility for wads. This port is called Zandronum. It branched off an older port called Skulltag, when the creator of Skulltag quit working on it and wouldn't give permission for the coding team to continue developing it. Fun fact: I dueled John Romero on Skulltag once, and kicked his ass :)

You can get Zandronum here: https://zandronum.com/download

Included with Zandronum is Doomseeker, the server browser that will let you join servers, download wads, etc.

Once you get all those things, you will want to copy doom2.wad into your Zandronum folder, and go into the settings of Doomseeker to set a download location for wads. I recommend pointing it to your Zandronum folder.

After that, you're pretty much done. You just need to launch Zandronum and set up all your options. Then you can go have fun!