Did DOS DooM have servers or was the multiplayer reserved to you local area?

I'd like to know how since i wasn't born at the time and if it did i would like to know how to emulate one through Dos Box without a lot of lag so me and my friends could play.

There's not a whole lot of reason to play on DOSBox nowadays. If you must use it, this is your best bet:

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/VanillaDM

I think Chocolate Doom makes more sense for a vanilla experience, and doesn't require additional tools..

That being said, I think you are going to have a better time playing on Odamex, ZDaemon, or Zandronum. Their online experience is much closer to what you would expect out of a modern online shooter.

Thanks but im still wondering about online servers back then.

Doom had no online servers. The concept of game servers as we know them was pretty much nonexistent. There were some services that let you play online, the most famous being DWANGO, which was a dial-up service. I recall an attempt to emulate the DWANGO protocol, but I don't think it was ever finished. Other common options included Kali, which would allow tunneling the IPX packets over a TCP network, allowing Internet play.

If you're using DosBox, there's no reason to worry about any of these, as its IPX network emulation should be able to communicate over the internet, and you can set up your game as if you were just setting up for LAN play back in the day. The period options are simply unlikely to work under DosBox, since it doesn't provide adequate emulation (ie for Kali) or it would rely on a now-dead service (DWANGO)

Doom only had local LAN play over IPX network or serial direct connection.  id wouldn't tackle internet play until Quake, and you wouldn't get network code that was truly prepared for internet play until QuakeWorld.  Quake worked over the internet not only because it spoke the correct protocol, but more importantly the entire game was designed from the ground up to be client/server.
 

Doom was not designed to be client/server, and in fact is almost antagonistically programmed against a client/server model at all.  But someone pulled it off anyway - the reason you can play Doom online in a "modern" sense of clients connecting to internet servers goes all the way back to csDoom, and all three of the major internet-capable ports can draw lineage to it, either directly or indirectly.

More specifically, the answer is neither. Doom didn't need servers, multiplayer games back in the early 90s were designed for direct communication. However you certainly weren't restricted to local players, even prior to mainstream adoption of the internet modems could be used to directly dial each other (as opposed to an ISP) or in select cases you could dial a service (such as the previously mentioned DWANGO) which provided its own driver for 4 player modem games*. Doom itself came with a serial, modem and IPX driver out of the box, allowing for 4 players over a LAN or 2 player modem games (technically anywhere in the world as long as you could physically dial the number and could front up the costs for the long distance call). IPX can also be used with remote networks, though this setup was quite rare. DOSBOX comes with a number of emulated network methods including for IPX that allows you to virtualize the environment over modern TCP, which just means all you need is somebody else to connect to your virtual tunnel and the game behaves the same with the same IPX driver.

* Why did you need a service like DWANGO for more than 2 players over modem? Same reason why you will have significant trouble dialling multiple numbers on your land line, you need an individual phone service to act as a conference point for all other numbers. Plus the driver needed to be designed to understand how to handle the traffic of multiple players, i.e which inputs come from whom.

I love the detailed answers to this! It's amazing that this way of setting up and playing has just... gone from imagination, now that online games are so convenient. Unreal Tournament was the first one I played that even had a game browser in it - even in the Quake days you had to use an external server browser called QuakeSpy (later GameSpy) which would find games in progress and launch Quake with parameters for you.

Here's a discord that has a lot of people knowledgeable about DosBox if you do want to play that way: https://discord.gg/QVr3QQZ

Also (even though others have already said this), just to be crystal clear, people did play international matches back in the 90's. There are known instances of Australians connecting to the Long Beach DWANGO server for example. Play over DWANGO actually wasn't that laggy thanks to the -extratic and -dup 2 commands which, in layman's terms, halves framerate to double speed - a great way to negate ping.

9 hours ago, Edward850 said:

multiplayer games back in the early 90s were designed for direct communication. However you certainly weren't restricted to local players, even prior to mainstream adoption of the internet modems could be used to directly dial each other

 

2 player modem games (technically anywhere in the world as long as you could physically dial the number and could front up the costs for the long distance call).

soooo... on Usenet when players asked for opponents, some/most of those numbers were their home numbers? Gee, what could go wrong?

It was a different time, wasn’t it. When I released little shareware games I used to put my home address on them! Would never do that now

15 hours ago, jghfugg29833 said:

I'd like to know how since i wasn't born at the time and if it did i would like to know how to emulate one through Dos Box without a lot of lag so me and my friends could play.

When Doom was released back in 1993 most people did not have an Internet connection and most people had never heard of the Internet. If you had a direct, wired internet connection you were probably at a university that was connected to the internet.

Some people with modems had accounts on online services like CompuServe - you'd dial up the service and it would give access to things like email and discussion forums. As time went on these services all became connected to the internet as well and became ISPs. There were also BBSes: these were just services you could dial up that in many cases were someone's home phone number with a computer accepting incoming calls.

Doom shipped with just dial-up and IPX networking. IPX works over a local network (LAN) so lots of people used their office networks to slack off work and play Doom. But IPX isn't based on the internet protocol (IP) so you couldn't use this to play over the internet.

Dial-up worked by calling someone else's home phone number where the other player is set up to answer the incoming call. Typically you'd talk on the phone first to make sure you were both ready, then hang up and dial back with the computer.

DWANGO took this a step further by providing a paid service you could dial up and play with other people through (the nice thing being that there was a lobby you could talk to others with to find someone to play against, and you could play with more than 2 people this way). There were also BBSes that added similar functionality as time went on.

Playing over the actual internet was possible but I don't know if it was very common. If you look in the Internet Doom FAQ you can find details of alternate network drivers like iFrag that allowed this. But again, you needed an Internet connection to do this, which would probably be dial-up anyway, and it was probably more reliable and cheaper to just call each other directly.

3 hours ago, Xeriphas1994 said:

 

soooo... on Usenet when players asked for opponents, some/most of those numbers were their home numbers? Gee, what could go wrong?

There was also something called the Doom modem contact list that didn't include full phone numbers but did include people's email addresses grouped by their area code. So the idea was that you could find someone in your local area to play against. Remember that phone calls could be expensive back then, especially long distance calls! 

2 hours ago, fraggle said:

Playing over the actual internet was possible but I don't know if it was very common. If you look in the Internet Doom FAQ you can find details of alternate network drivers like iFrag that allowed this. But again, you needed an Internet connection to do this, which would probably be dial-up anyway, and it was probably more reliable and cheaper to just call each other directly.

I wonder why none of those survived past the dial-up age, then. There was a significant overlap when vanilla Doom was still runnable, and cable Internet became commonplace. Such free tools like iDOOM/iFrag would have been useful!

I also wonder: how did you create games in vanilla DOOM multiplayer? Who decided the map, skill, game mode, respawn parameters etc.? The first player or the last who joined? I know I tried DM.EXE once and it felt confusing, because it seems that the last joining player had the final say on game parameters! Am I wrong? Was it better than this?

5 minutes ago, printz said:

I also wonder: how did you create games in vanilla DOOM multiplayer? Who decided the map, skill, game mode, respawn parameters etc.? The first player or the last who joined? I know I tried DM.EXE once and it felt confusing, because it seems that the last joining player had the final say on game parameters! Am I wrong? Was it better than this?

Player 1 is typically the one who controls the parameters. Who player 1 is depends on the protocol. 

In the early days of source ports supporting TCP protocol, I think we played dos versions of Doom Legacy, and later windows Doom Legacy and windows ZDoom.   ZDoomdos may have supported TCP but wasn't updated after a while.   Trying to think if the port called dosDoom (which Legacy was originally based on), before it was called EDGE, got some internet play at some point.

It is true that while many ports like Legacy were playable over the internet, most of them kept the oldschool designed-for-LAN netcode, and simply piped it over an internet connection.  It worked, but because of the way Doom handled network play you could generally only play 1v1...if you were lucky.  2+ was incredibly dodgy.  And no matter how many experience would not be fantastic, and joining in the middle of someone else's the game wasn't really possible on any port I remember.

You really do need Quake-style client/server or Overwatch-style deterministic rollback client/server to make playing games over the internet tolerable at scale.  That's why people play csDoom forks today although I think Chocolate has a community as well.

...and there is ....
http://kali.net/

...still around..:-)

10 hours ago, DoomGater said:

...and there is ....
http://kali.net/

...still around..:-)

There was another one of these called Khan that I used a good amount.  Unfortunately most evidence of it and the "Stargate Networks" company??? that made it seems to have mostly fallen off the face of the internet, aside from the odd archived site.

Late to the party, but in the light of this thread I thought I'd share some looks into the PC Zone archives that I recently came across:

March '95 - BBS 4-player mentioned on page 18 (also... Doom CAD on p.114)

April '95 - More technical BBS instructions for 4-player (p.8), and... Doom III rumours (p.22)

Aug '95 - Ultimate Doom review, Mac Doom (p.116), BBS etiquette (p.117)

...there's plenty other interesting stuff from the period in these & adjacent issues, like Heretic writeups, Dark Forces, Apogee, Doom clones, etc. You can find PC Gamer UK archives on the same site. If you have problems reading the text, use the zoom function!

Here are some other ones I took note of:

March '94 - Doom review (p.134-135) - obviously the shareware version had been around & been kicking up a fuzz for some time already

Nov '94 - Doom II review (p.60-64)

Jan '95 - Deathmatch profiles begin to emerge to some notoriety (p.8)

June '95 - "Thy Flesh Consumed" announced, Doom III debunked

July '95 - "Ultimate Doom" appears in ads for the first time

Sep '95 - Macca's DWANGO experience on p.110-111 - apologies to American readers ahead of time xD

...Macca had been hoping to deathmatch Romero, who is credited with creating DWANGO on p.18 - lol

Oct '95 - Master Levels article (physical release mentioned Jan '96)