Hacking Converting M3 GBA saves to work with Emulators?

[Xirix]

I have a .sav from Pokemon Emerald that I've been playing on my M3DS Real NDS flashcart. I want to be able to load my save in Visualboy Advance ( or No$GBA, doesn't really matter ) so I can use some cheats, then send it back to my flashcart.

When simply putting the rom and .sav in the Visualboy Advance folder it says the save file is corrupt, do I need to convert or do any special settings to get it to work?

Thanks