use Himatchi
It creates a VPN or a fake lan
Also, in order to make this game work on w7/vista without the horrid graphics glitches, you need create a batch file. Here's how-
1)Open notepad
2) paste the following code in
taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe
age2_x1.exe
Start explorer.exe
3)Save it as a .bat file and put it in the "age2_x1" folder of your game dir.
4) Launch the bat file and you're done.
What the file does is closes explorer, opens the game, then re-runs explorer once you've closed AoE2.
This is only for the Conqs expansion.