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cleve said:
Programs I need?

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U.O.D. said:
Zdoom is by far the most advanced sourceport

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kristus said:
That's a popular misconception.

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Jodwin said:
First things first, to play together with a friend you need to have the two computers connected to each other either through a lan, a wlan or the internet. If you have a broadband router/modem where you can connect multiple computers, you might be able to use that as a normal lan router as well.

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Then, as for Doom...if all you want to do is play together with a friend, I'd recommend ZDaemon or Skulltag. Doesn't really matter which one you choose. A lot of other ports have some multiplayer capabilities as well, but those two are probably the safest bets for you. They also come with their own server finding tools to (hopefully) make playing easier for beginners.

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One thing to keep in mind, amongst all the port zealotry, is that there's no reason to not have multiple source ports installed. You can get as many as you want and try them all out if you want to. With that in mind, if you're also interested in single player I'd recommend both ZDoom and prboom+. Other people have already covered why ZDoom, and prboom+ is a good choice because it lets you play Doom either with vanilla compatibility or as a pure Boom port, and you can choose what extra features to use or not use (such as unlimited framerate, opengl graphics, and so on).

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You might end up with quite a few different ports downloaded, not to mention a lot of different wads. You can either try to manage everything by hand and with shortcuts and command line, or you can use a launcher. One popular launcher that was already mentioned is ZDL (short for ZDoom Launcher). An other launcher to try out is CDL. With CDL playing multiplayer in, for example, ZDoom is just a matter of picking the port, the wads and then typing "-host 2" (for the host) or "-join HOST IP" (for the joinee) to the command line argument field.

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