Questions/survey below my paragraph

Out of all the GOG releases, this one has perplexed me the most. Attached is an image of the Wrath of Khan skirmish (one of my favorites; due to the movie) on 640x480 using software. After installing this both ways (through site and galaxy), editing registries to unlock the compatibility settings (thanks, GOG!), this game is no closer to running well on my machine. Software seems most stable, display seems sluggish and eventually crashes, hardware is a no-go. I even installed it on an XP virtual machine just to see if it was Windows 8 shenanigans, but alas it craps out, too. (long story short: I have the physical copy of SFC, runs with no issue on the virtual machine).

So tl;dr survey time.

1. Are you running your game on Software, Display or Hardware?
2. How much editing to the config did you have to do?
3. What OS did you have to force this to work in (Windows 8, Windows 8 but adopted Windows 10 after obtaining/setting up or Windows 10 by the time you obtained the game)?

Any insight helps.

Thanks!

Note: I'd like to add that installing the physical copy of SFC on a computer that has the GOG copy of SFC tends to meld both of them together. Oddly enough, this seems to produce a better (stable and playable) game on Software mode; but it does eliminate the nebula cloud all together of the Wrath of Khan scenario. Deleting one or the other tends to take the other with it. Peculiar :-).

Have you tried this on your main machine? https://www.gog.com/forum/star_trek_starfleet_command/potential_win_10_fix

As for your XP virtual machine, have you installed appropriate 3D acceleration support, as well as DirectX 9.0c? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109 (do note that this only extracts the files you need to a folder, and from that folder you need to run DXSETUP.exe)

The mouse/blitter fix seems to appease running on Primary Display Driver. Attempting to use the Hardware option is still a loss. I think I tried applying that once using hardware, but that didn't solve the issue. So I overlooked it on the Primary Display Driver, I thank you for pointing that out to me again (and trying a second go at it). It may be a fix I need to implement on the VM as well.

As for the VMs, I've installed DirectX 9.0c on them (I have an XP VM for VirtualBox and VMware respectively; each seem to have their strengths and weaknesses - depending on the classic game type I'm trying to run)