The game wants the Manager's command line as well as its registry key

What to know

2026-10-24, Wine 10 in the emulated PC (docs/ground-truth.md).

Symptom: with every value of HKCU\Software\Refinery\Hardman\Config written (a +reg trace shows config_read reading all of them, up to PhilsEnding), HARDWARW.EXE still stops with "Please run Hardwar from the Hardwar Manager only."

Cause: the message has one user, at 0x4105c5 in the command-line parser FUN_004103b4 (observed). The parser walks the arguments. When none of them is a /t: option, it shows the message and quits. The Manager starts the game with one of /t:new FILE, /t:load FILE, /t:connect, /t:newserver FILE, /t:loadserver FILE or /t:video NAME (the keywords are the strings at 0x53021c-0x530348); /t:lobby is refused ("Lobby launching is not supported in this version"). config_read (0x412928) fails silently instead: it returns early and leaves DAT_00580234 at 0, and win_main then quits without a word.

Fix: start the game as the Manager does, HARDWARW.EXE /t:new C:\HARDWAR\SAVES\NAME.SAV for a new world named NAME, or /t:load C:\HARDWAR\SAVES\NAME.SAV to load one (Hardwar's vm_run.sh).

For GameFrame: a launcher-only game can check its command line as well as its configuration. Search the "run from the launcher" string's users before writing more registry values.