Well the ONLY way around the patcher to connect to the EQemu's own emulation server running is with the older patch or warez. If people get warez from this page then they have deffinatly croseed the line of being legal, thereofor they can get shut down. So if people talk about warez, those few people mayl get it working for a a little while, but the project will get shut down over it and everyone will suffer.
The thing that I think is misleading in their posts is that you CAN connect to your own EQemu server or others that are up on their login server with the current patch.
I'll tell you what I did (with programs from their main page only) to get it working (I still get the 1017 error from their own emulation though).
1) I installed Everquest.
2) I ran everquest without any changes to allow it to patch with the official server.
3) I installed the patcher from EQemus main page.
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/e...r.exe?download
NOTE: It only worked for me when it was installed directly into my everquest directory. If it was installed anywhere else it failed.
4) I changed eqhost.txt as they mention on their page so you connect to their login server.
http://www.eqemu.net/eqhost.txt
5) I registered an account with them.
http://forums.eqemu.net/profile.php?mode=register
6) I opened EQ with EQW2.32 (newer versions of eqw did not work for me and don't seem to work for others either...) This is an external link
http://rotccoverup.no-ip.com/eqw232.zip If you don't want to run EQwindows then you can make a shortcut to everquest and go into properties and after the c:\EQ\eqgame.exe write 'patchme' without the quotes.
7) I connected and saw all the EQemu servers.

I tried a few and can connect to most.
If you want to connect to the EQemu everquest server you have to wait I think, but if you want to connect to other servers from the EQemu login this works fine. Let me know if this helps anyone or if I was the only one confused by what they were saying...