Setting up the Epson EL2

TLDR; The Epson EL2 reference disk is available online (and attached here) but is the Italian version. I couldn't find an English version.
It works, except for trying to set user parameters (geometry) for the hard drive. On boot you get a 1770 Drive 0 parameters error.
This is due to a BIOS / setup utility language mismatch - replace SETUP.UTY with the one attached and you should be good to go, though you may need to set one of the preset types first and reboot for it to work.

Longer version follows:

The Epson EL2 requires its own setup utility to configure CMOS settings, and it seems the English version is lost to the sands of time.
Fortunately it's not too hard to figure out the Italian version even if you don't read it - or use the translate app on your phone with the camera. 👍

Generic utilities like GSETUP will probably work for most settings, however they usually only allow selection of drive types up to 47. Additionally some of the utilities I tried were not able to read the drive types table correctly. The EL2 actually supports up to 65(?) drive types, and the value stored in CMOS for the "non standard" type (aka user-defined geometry) is 255.
The utility CMOSER.EXE is able to read & support up to 255 drive types, and was extremely useful during my troubleshooting - especially for viewing raw CMOS data and drive geometry as reported by DOS vs the BIOS.

The EL2 uses a DS1287 which only saves 64 bytes of data - user-defined parameters are usually saved in extended CMOS which the DS1287 does not have.
Therefore the EL2 takes the approach of saving the geometry info on the hard drive itself.
This took me wayyy too long to discover. 😣

I finally found it using Norton DiskEdit, and then had a bit of an aha moment.

During POST, if type 255 is set, the EL2 looks on the hard drive for the parameters. If it can't find them then it throws the 1770 error - but it is actually checking for a signature match using the BIOS text.
This can be seen using debug:

▶️ If that hard drive text (which is in Italian) doesn't match the BIOS (which is in English) then POST doesn't find the parameters and throws the 1770 error. "TIPO DRIVE EPSON" needs to be "EPSON DRIVE TYPE".

The Fix...

One way is to use DiskEdit to change the text - but in order to do that, the drive needs to be visible, which it is not if the 1770 error has occurred. So you'd need to: Set the custom type, reboot again from floppy, set a standard type, reboot, then fix the text using DiskEdit. Then you've got a problem though as you need to use the setup utility to set the custom type again - which will undo your hard work. Alternatively you could use CMOSER to save & restore the CMOS settings.

Easier to just patch the utility 😁 Fortunately it's stored in plaintext in SETUP.UTY which I have patched & attached here for posterity.

Note: I did all my troubleshooting using an 80MB drive, then decided to test this process using a different drive. I did have some trouble with setup not writing to the new drive correctly when I'd switched it over, possible due to the 1770 error. So if it doesn't seem to work, you may need to use one of the standard types first (I expect that just selecting type 1 will probably work), reboot, and then configure your desired geometry using the setup utility again.

Epilogue...

I spent way too much time on this. 🫨
I'm still not sure why I refused to give up... I just needed to know! 🤣
So I really hope that this helps someone out there sometime...!!
If it does please make me feel like it was all worthwhile by saying thanks 😆

Also... Since everything seems to be in plaintext, I suppose it might be possible to further patch the setup utility files and translate them into English (assuming you get the strings the same length etc).
But I'll leave that to someone else! 🤣