Atari STart Magazine Cover Disks

Backstory:

STart Editorial introducing the Heidi Format

STart magazine ran from Summer of 1986 to April/May 1991. It usually used single-sided disks, but in November of 1989 they switched to a double-sided format but using a special bootsector that made them look like single-sided disks.

This is called the "Heidi Format", and they explain it in an Editorial note. Instructions on how to use these disks are on page 64 of the November 1989 issue.

The last issue using the format was April 1990 (Vol 4, No 9) as explained in another Editorial Note

But the end result is that these disks are double-sided, but disk imaging software may mistake them for single-sided. This happened when all the STart disks were imaged, so existing collections of the disks are actually missing half the content.

The menu screen of a Heidi disk

I'm trying to organize locating and re-imaging these affected disks.

Issues affected:

Date	Volume/Number	Affected?	Reimaged yet?	Notes
October 1989 & earlier	Vol 4 No 3	No	Not needed
November 1989	Vol 4 No 4	Yes	No	The first issue affected.
December 1989	Vol 4 No 5	Yes	No
January 1990	Vol 4 No 6	Yes	No
February 1990	Vol 4 No 7	Yes	No
March 1990	Vol 4 No 8	Yes	No
April 1990	Vol 4 No 9	Yes	No	Last issue to use the Heidi Format
May 1990 - April/May 1991	Vol 4 No 10 - Vol 5 No 7	No	Not needed

External Links:

• My twitter thread explaining the issue
• Atari Forum thread about the issue
• Collection of existing disk images
• Internet Archive collection of STart Magazine issues
• AtariMania collection