[Wine] How to work Age of Empires II...

[Light Engine]

Hello all,

First off, I wanted to shoot off a big thanks for the folks who spend their valuable time working on WINE and also on these forums to help out computer illiterate folks like myself. Thanks for "fighting the good fight".

Anyway, onward with the question.

I currently have a cracked version of AOE II, including the Conquerors expansion on my computer. Before I got it on the computer, I downloaded WINE 1.1.13, so I have that on my computer. I run Ubuntu Hardy Heron on my laptop, which is a Dell Inspiron E1505. 

Now... I can start AOE II, and it runs almost immediately, skipping all the into videos and stuff, which is perfectly fine. However, I noticed that my taskbars/toolbars on the top and bottom of the screen are still there! Setting these to autohide didn't help, and actually when I would bring the cursor up (or down) the bars would appear and freeze the game. Also, the screen can't seem to "keep up" when I am scrolling around the map, and the computer just generally didn't seem able to handle the game. 

My questions are, does this cracked version still require me to use it in WINE? Is that why it isn't "isolated" from the desktop like every other program I open? If I need to run it using WINE...how do I do so?

These are just some basic questions, the other stuff about the black font and other things can wait, I just want it to work in the basic sense right now.

I really would appreciate some answers, or guidance to answers on this. Thanks a lot!

-LE