Unicode::Map8 provides an 8-bit to 8-bit method, and is extremely comprehensive in its coverage of character maps. You have to poke through things to figure out which code pages to use, but that's a problem I faced anyway.

Had I known it existed I would likely have used it.

Instead I learned some new things about perl :)

Update:
It turns out for portability issues that the Unicode::Map8 module is really the way to go.

Thanks for the tip!