Pokémon Emerald Cheat Codes

This trips up almost everyone. A code labelled “GameShark v3” on one site and “Action Replay” on another is usually the same code, because those two devices share a code format. gamehacking.org, which catalogues these things for a living, files them under a single heading: GameShark Advance/Action Replay. Code Breaker — sold later as GameShark SP, and in Europe as Xploder — is the one that genuinely differs.

You do not need to know any of that to use the table, because the two formats look different on sight. A GameShark or Action Replay line is eight characters, a space, then eight more: 7881A409 E2026E0C. A Code Breaker line is eight characters, a space, then four: 82005274 0044. If a code you found elsewhere has short second groups, it is a Code Breaker code, whatever the page called it.

That is also why some rows here have a code in one column and “no code for this device” in the other. It is not an omission. Plenty of Emerald cheats were only ever written for one of the two families, and showing a blank is more honest than pasting a code that will not run.

Most of the longer Emerald codes need a master code switched on first. The master code is not a cheat in itself — it patches the game so the device can write to memory at all. Without it the emulator accepts your code, reports no error, and nothing happens, which is the single most common reason people conclude a working code is broken.

Enter the master code as its own separate cheat, enable it, and leave it enabled while you use the others. It is at the top of the table, and each column has its own — the GameShark master code will not serve a Code Breaker code or the reverse.

Emerald has a second one. The wild encounter and level modifier cheats use a different master code from the general one, and it is listed as its own row rather than buried in a footnote.

Four things, and all of them are avoidable. The first is the shiny name glitch: catch a Pokémon while the shiny cheat is active and its name comes out corrupted. Turning the cheat off before you throw the ball avoids it entirely, and the Pokémon stays shiny.

The second is the bad egg. Encounter cheats — shiny, wild modifier, catching a trainer’s Pokémon — can drop an egg into your party that will not hatch and cannot be released. It is harmless until you save. If one appears, disable the cheat that caused it and do not save; if you already saved, moving it into a PC box is the usual containment.

The third is running several cheats at once. Two memory-writing codes that touch nearby addresses will freeze or restart the game, and there is no way to predict which pairs collide. Enable one at a time.

The fourth is item-filling cheats that stuff the bag with unusable entries and leave no room for real items. That is why this page carries specific item codes rather than an “all items” code.

VisualBoyAdvance keeps cheats under the Cheats menu, and it will not guess the type for you — choose GameShark or Code Breaker to match the code you are pasting. mGBA puts the list under Tools, and can detect the type itself, which makes it the forgiving option.

My Boy! on Android detects the type too, but the free version holds only one line per cheat. Multi-line codes still work: enter each line as its own separate cheat entry and enable them together. That is the documented workaround, not a hack.

Delta on iOS works the same way as the others, with one thing worth watching — it asks for the cheat type when you add the code, and picking the wrong one fails silently exactly as it does everywhere else.