Or: Can you shortly explain, what's *not* covered with your mapper file?
I answered that in the mentioned post. Just a short example: Both Fn-comma and Fn-dot map to the same DOS key: Semicolon. (You'd expect that for Fn-comma, less for Fn-dot.) You get the colon by typing Shift-Fn-dot (and Shift-Fn-comma, of course). Most keys are easy to find that way (The Rule: try adding shift if it doesn't work like you expect), but not all. Some more details, like said,
in my post about that, in the spoiler section.
As far as I understand the mapping scheme, we are mapping KEYS here. Entire keys. That's the reason, why the colon cannot be mapped correctly, because it's the shifted semi-colon on a US keyboard (?) and on the Pandora it's two seperate keys.
That's right. The DOSbox is unable to receive sth like a shifted value. Insead it receives a "1" and a "Shift" and infers a "!" from the keyboard layout determined by the driver. And as far as I know there is no standard keyboard layout using the same combinations of Key/Shifted Key the Pandora seems to entertain.
However, the dosbox.conf value for toggleing usage of scancodes seems to suggest, that we could also map on a lower level, not entire keys, but each of the several "meanings" of a key separately, which would enable correct mapping independent on the "contents" of one key in the key mapping driver of DOS inside DOSBox.
Is this assumption correct? Should we look into scancode-based mapping rather than key-based mapping?
Also true. And I walked that way, but enabling scancodes resulted in several characters not arriving in DOSbox in any form, therefore not being mappable. (To be entirely correct, having bits stripped and arriving at the same key marked "unknown".)
Then I thought there could be a way of generating DOSbox-compatible scancodes via .pndXmodmap and then map those. But that would not help at all with mapping shifted values to unshifted values, which the Pandora keyboard layout demands. So, that's also a cul-de-sac unless I miss something.
So I used the xkeyb driver from
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/xkeyb/xkeyb/ (
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/xkeyb/xkeyb/xkb1_15x.zip to be precise, they have a handful).
That required some awkward back-and-forth-mapping which made the reslulting DOSbox mapper file a tad unpleasant for normal use, but, in combination with the configured xkeyb driver, resulted in a keyboard where every single key was where it belonged (and some room for Umlaute and stuff).
You seem to be very understanding and willing to experiment, so should I leave those configuration files as an exercise for you?
(For the time being I have to; I don't have them at hand.)
