1. Why would 0.62.2 run Ikari fine and 0.94 is jittery/jumpy/slow in sound and movement? Could it be a setting?
Generally speaking, MAME degrades in performance, sometimes significantly, every few releases or so. If you're looking to play a lot of the games that have been emulated for a while you're probably going to want to stick with the older version of MAME, unless your hardware can handle it.
That's why you see a lot of people here run more than one version of MAME, depending on which ROM they want to load.
I know it seems a little weird.. I mean, why would degrading in performance be a good thing? Well, as more and more games get emulated they also get more and more complex. In order to have streamlined and organized code in MAME, updating drivers for the game platform will affect all games that run on that platform.
HTH.
-sab