Hm... I thought so. The thing is, that's not really true?
I applied Delta Emerald's patch over a clean Pokémon Emerald ROM, and it boots up just fine in VBA Link v1.7.2 and v1.8.0 :/
Once you change the default savetype which is not compatible with neither Pokémon FRLG nor Emerald and is a process you always have to do right after getting these old versions of VBA just like enabling the RTC, the hack works normally.

