A treat for Atari 2600 game players. Classic Atari game ROMs can now be downloaded quickly with the click of a script. Get-Em is a new Linux app from VR51. It downloads classic Atari game disks from mushca.com.
Mushca hosts all 443 Atari compilation disks that are known to exist and many popular classic games that are not in the disk sets. These sets are regularly updated to include new Atari games and newly discovered old Atari games, and bad programs are frequently replaced with clean versions.
The Atari games downloaded from Mushca run in Emulators like Atari800 and MAME. These games are for all 8-bit systems like the Atari 400, Atari 800, Atari 130, Atari 2600, Atari 5200 and Atari 7800. A guide to MAME and other emulators is here at JournalXtra.
Get-Em provides an easy way to download all Atari disk sets and to keep the sets up to date. The download options are:
- Downloaded the most recently updated disk
- Download a specific disk or range of disks
- Download all disks
- Delete message log
- Exit program
Questions Answered
Get-Em is a classic Atari games download script for Linux.
The games are provided through mushca.com.
Run Get-Em once to download all disks then run Get-Em every day or two to read the update messages and to download any Atari disk updates.
Mushca updates and adds new disks several times per month.
Get-Em downloads the numbered disk compilations only. These are disks 1 to 437. These disks contain many, maybe most, of the classic games released for the Atari 8 bit systems. You will need to download non numbered games manually. These game files are in the A to Z index listed without a disk number in their row.
The most up to date list is shown at the Muscha website.
There is a downloadable list of the software included in the disks. This list can be downloaded from Get-Em’s GitHub repository (click the download link at the bottom of this page). The list is provided in both CSV and PDF format and is will always be a month or two out of date.
How to download all classic Atari game ROMs
- Download Get-Em (you only need file get-em.sh)
- Move get-em.sh to the directory into which games will be downloaded (Perhaps your Atari games directory)
- Make the program executable (right-click get-em.sh > properties > Executable)
- Click get-em.sh
- Select the option number of the required action.
Get-Em downloads the numbered disks only. Some old Atari games are not contained within the compilation disks. You must visit mushca.com to grab these manually by going through the A-Z games index.
Get-Em will not immediately unzip the software files downloaded. Some Emulators prefer the files zipped, others prefer them unzipped. Atari800 likes them unzipped. You must select the ‘unzip files’ option after they have downloaded.
Get-Em lets can ‘unzip and keep’ the zipped files or ‘unzip and delete’ the zip files. Choose carefully. Be aware that all files (game files or not) in the working directory will be unzipped (and deleted if specified). Advice: use Get-Em in a directory of its own.
Get-Em records Mushca’s catalogue update message as published at the time Get-Em is run. If multiple update messages are released between runs, Get-Em will only show the message captured when Get-Em was last run i.e. Get-Em captured the message published at the time of the current run and stores any messages captured by previous get-em.sh runs. Messages published between runs will not be known to Get-Em and so will not be logged.
Tell Us
Tell us about your classic Atari gaming memories. What was your favorite game? Which Atari computer is your favorite? When did you first play Atari?