Hello everyone! I apologize for the length of this thread, and I appreciate everyone's patience in advanced. I know there have been many threads on this topic before, but just can't find a thread that addresses my specific problem. I'm not extremely computer smart, but I guess knowledgeable enough to get me by. So if something doesn't make sense, just let me know and I'll try to better explain it.
So I started playing an emulator for the first time in a loooonnnngggg time a week ago. It's actually been quite a few years since I've played any emulators because I just simply haven't had time. But I just got the itch to play Pokemon, to take my back to my childhood. lol. I played Pokemon Emerald on No$GBA 2.6a, and beat the main story line. I originally started looking into other emulators simply because of the "fog" issue with No$GBA in Emerald as well as wanting to do a bit of trading within the emulator windows to obtain all the Pokemon and experiment with the "cheat" function within the emulator (which the cheat function of No$GBA sucks and most of the codes I could find wont work in No$GBA), and according to a number of people, VBA is the emulator to use. So I downloaded VBA 1.8.0-511 and booted up Pokemon Emerald in VBA 1.8.0 and tried to load my save from No$GBA. It wouldn't work. So I did a little more reading, and read that the save protocol between the 2 emulators are different. So i researched how to change the No$GBA save file to work with VBA. I followed a thread I discovered which took me through converting the save file which included going into the No$GBA.INI file and changing the save type from compressed to RAW. Then I went back into No$GBA, saved my progress in Emerald under the new save protocol, and there we had it.
So I moved everything into the same folder (VBA 1.8.0, the rom, and the .SAV file), and started VBA 1.8.0, booted Emerald, but my save file wasn't coming up. so i went to File>Import>Battery>mysavefile.SAV and it pops up with "Importing a snapshot file will erase any saved games and reset the emulator. Do you want to coninue?" I clicked OK. But then an error pops up that says "Cannot open File c:/.........mysavefile.SAV." So I try the File>Load>mysavefile.SAV and it gives me an error "Unsupported VisualBoyAdvance save game version 1633906510. After that I started a new game and saved from the new game to see what this VBA save file would look like. I noticed that all the extensions from the save file on VBA 1.8.0 are .sa1, 2, 3, ... etc. depending on how many windows I have open. So I decided to change the extension of the .SAV file to .sa3 (because I already had a .sa1, and .sa2 from previous experimenting), and tried to load the .sa3 file from No$GBA and it's still not loading. It gives me the same errors I get when I tried loading as a .SAV.
Can anyone help me figure this issue out? The last thing I want to do is completely start over using VBA.