I can't see any ship explosions (debris just floats off into the void).
Nebulas look like solid colour with random dots throughout it.
I can see _through_ ship models.

I tried switching from software to primary video driver using sfcconfig but the game wont play missions after that, menu and intro movie only before CTD.

Nevermind, i worked it out myself.

for those who are curious (this applies to Win10 users, especially NVIDIA ones)

download dgvoodoo (latest version, doesn't matter which).

Copy the cpl executable into the base SFC folder.
Select the ./ button to change the active directory to the SFC directory.

Set the Output API to Direct3D 11 (feature level 10.1)
Leave all the other settings alone in general

Switch to the DirectX tab:
set the video card to dgVooDoo Virtual 3D and give the VRAM 1024MB

Uncheck dgVooDoo Watermark, leave every other setting default.

Go run config.exe out of the SFC base directory and set the video card to primary display driver, change the resolution to 1280xwhatever.

Then finally, go and edit sfc.ini to set async=0 and set lowres=3.

Launch the game, full graphics will work perfectly.

the only part I have _not_ been able to resolve is the aspect ratio distortion, SFC is a 4:3 game, my display is a 16:9, so it stretched horizontally, i could not get the game or the monitor to respect the proper aspect ratio. Maybe someone else can work that out.

These instructions _exactly the same_ worked for the SFC2 Community Edition in windows 10.