yeah, i should also mention i just downloaded the newest d-fend reloaded, and the newest dosbox and that i have d-fend reloaded using the newest version of dosbox.

Does it work without the frontend?

not quite sure. i'm running the frontend to avoid having to learn the CLI stuff and make it easier to use dosbox. i was hoping enough people used d-fend or that this was a common enough problem.

If it happens without using a frontend it obviously is unrelated to the frontend.

If you click on "View DOSBox conf file" from the context menu of the profile you want to start you can see the conf file which is used when starting DOSBox. In this file there should be a line "mapperfile=..." in the [sdl] section. This line tells DOSBox where to look for the mapper.txt file (by default this is "C:\Users\<you>\D-Fend Reloaded\mapper.txt"). If you edit this file and DOSBox is not doing what you want, its a DOSBox/sdl/hardware issue. If the "mapperfile=..." line isn't there or it's directing to a file you haven't selected in the D-Fend Reloaded configuration, it's a DFR bug.

so i feel pretty stupid. the problem was that i was getting the keymapping backwards. i was trying to map they q,w,e,a,s,d keys on my keyboard to work as kp 4-9 for lands of lore. i was instead mapping the keypad to do the letters, and due to using the keymapper program originally, i hadn't erased the original binding so they still worked to move the characters around making it seem like nothing had changed.

thank you for your help, even if it was to point me in the direction of discovering my own errors!

-pinecones

Nice that you could figure it out on your own 😀
The readme has some explained example about getting it "rightwards" btw.