How to Import GBA4iOS Saves into Delta

GBA4iOS was Riley Testut's earlier Game Boy Advance emulator for iOS, released before Delta and no longer available on the App Store. A lot of long-time players still have save files sitting in old backups from it, and the good news is those saves work perfectly fine in Delta — both emulators use the same raw .sav format underneath.

The catch is that Delta matches a save file to a game purely by filename, not by any embedded metadata. If your ROM is named pokemon-firered.gba, Delta expects the save to be named pokemon-firered.sav exactly — any mismatch and Delta will treat it as a fresh, empty save instead of loading your progress.

This guide walks through finding the old save, renaming it correctly, and getting it recognized by Delta without touching the actual save data.

Always keep a copy of the original .sav file before renaming or importing anything — if the filename match fails, you don't want to have overwritten your only backup.

Save formats are usually compatible across emulators for the same console, but region and revision mismatches (e.g. a US ROM with a save made against a Japanese release) can occasionally cause corruption. Stick to the same regional ROM version you originally played on.

If Delta still shows an empty save after importing, double-check the file extension is exactly .sav (not .SAV or .sav.txt, which iOS sometimes appends silently) and that the base filename matches character-for-character.