Pokémon Sapphire And Ruby ROM Support Found In FireRed/LeafGreen Switch Files, Dataminer Claims
More classic Pokémon games could potentially join the Switch's library
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Pokémon Sapphire And Ruby ROM Support Found In FireRed/LeafGreen Switch Files, Dataminer Claims
More classic Pokémon games could potentially join the Switch's library
Pokémon
Lewis Parker
Published February 27, 2026
Comments (3)
[Image: A GBA Pokémon game is displayed on the Switch.]
The Pokémon Company
The Nintendo Switch ports of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreenFireRed and LeafGreen.
That includes the saddening news that profanity is now banned when naming your in-game character/rival and, according to one player who has somehow already made it to the end of the game, the inclusion of the Aurora Ticket and Mystic Ticket limited-time distribution items. You can shiny-hunt Deoxys, but you can no longer call your arch-nemesis ASSCLOWN. Nintendo giveth, and Nintendo taketh away.
However, the most interesting revelation, according to a dataminer by the name of Yakumono/LuigiBlood, is that the emulator used to boot Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen reportedly supports ROMs for Pokémon Sapphire, Ruby, and Emerald as well. That would hint at possible plans for Nintendo to bring more classic Pokémon games from the series’ GBA days to the Switch and Switch 2 libraries.
According to a dataminer, the Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen releases from today internally also have compatibility for Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald, meaning those could be coming in the future. pic.twitter.com/MvdB0sJS7N
— Centro LEAKS (@CentroLeaks) February 27, 2026
In a post on Bluesky, LuigiBlood stated that they’d uncovered a few interesting tidbits about the new GBA Switch ports, including that the emulator in question is Sloop, the same emulator Nintendo uses for the Game Boy Advance games featured in the Nintendo Classics library, and that the ROMs have been “heavily modified and rebuilt.”
Of course, that’s small potatoes compared to their biggest reported discovery. “The only other information I will put out is that the emulator explicitly recognizes ROMs of Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald alongside FireRed and LeafGreen. I found this alongside the initialization code that is related to enabling emulator hacks for specific games.”
If this is indeed correct, does this mean that ports of the third-gen Pokémon games might be coming to the Nintendo Switch eShop in the near future? In a follow-up reply, LuigiBlood was quick to state that we shouldn’t be getting ahead of ourselves on that front. “What we see is a snapshot of current code at the moment it was built. It’s not an oracle. Maybe it means RSE is next, maybe it’s never actually happening. It just means they had intentions at one point and nothing else.”
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[Original source](https://kotaku.com/pokemon-saphire-ruby-emerald-switch-2-datamine-2000674544)