it's done by users, so everything is possible 😉

As said, everything is possible and not every game gets tested again with a newer version.
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I've always understood these lists as inclusive. If something works with 0.70, there's no reason for it not to work with 0.74, so as long as it's listed as working with any version, you're fine using the newest. Ofc regressions are possible, but most testing spent before any DB release is about regressions. If it doesn't say it's broken with the newest there's no reason to think it won't work if it was tested with an older version 😀

I'd say Guli is right. Most people don't retest with a newer version.

The other issue here is that people even less frequently go back to test games on older releases. So even if the numbers for the current release were complete across the inventory of DOS games, they wouldn't be directly compatible to the numbers from prior releases (unless similar efforts to test every game against them were made). More or less the stats may be nice to look at, and have some merit individually, but probably shouldn't be compared with one another.

With console emulation the number of games tends to be much smaller (i.e. ~711 GameCube titles), leading to easier reviews (though it's still taking us a while to work through the GameCube games for Dolphin).

Thanks. That cleared off some doubts.

Also, from the above chart, the number of Broken Games predictably falls as the Dosbox version increased. There were two notable spikes, though, - namely with Dosbox v0.63 and v0.72. I guess that's attributable to the relatively increased number of games tested.

But generally, I agree 0.74 is incrementally improved over all other versions and is the most compatible version so far.

EDIT: Someone labelled The Elder Scrolls : Arena as broken for 0.74, and it is showing in the chart in the Game Directory box. I guess the person who tested it didn't configure something properly or he might have a problem with his system setup. (Under alphabet 'T' list.)

Arena plays well in dosbox, even older ones.

I guess I should just read the compaitbility list cautiosly and maybe with a pinch of salt. 😁

It's quite telling that 0.74 doesn't have a very high number of games tested in the compatiblity database (628), especially compared to older versions, even though it's the longest-lived DOSBox version so far (3 years and counting).