I just stumbled upon on old section of the EP main side:
http://www.emuparadise.me/gameservers.php
So EP has set up servers for retro online gaming. But where is the place where matches are organized? The page above only points to the forums in general. A quick search did not bring up anything about the EP game servers. So I guess that thread was killed in the server crash XX years ago
Or are the servers down and nobody disposed of the above web page? :'(