WinMX works just like it used to. You have to patch it to connect to the main servers.
Here's the short version. The long version can seem kind of petty.
When WinMX was shut down, it was done by killing the peer cache servers. These were the one's run by Frontcode that kept track of everybody else that was connected so that you know who was on the network to connect to.
Shortly after this, somebody made public that they had a peer cache server running. Now, there are a few servers running.
To connect to one of these 'underground' servers, you need to patch your system. Right now there are two patches you can use to tell your computer where the new servers are.
You can get the
Pie Patch from Vladd. It overwrites your Windows host file. It's all in plain text, so you can read through what you're doing easily.
There's also a
dll patch that only affects WinMX. It's written by KM.