kbhit() - up/down key events ?

The last keyboard I had that did this was on my Exidy Sorcerer back in the middle 1970s. On that machine you could write your own keyboard driver to `strobe' the key status, and detect _every_ press and release of _every_ key. Very soon, however, this gave way to keyboards that had enough logic in them to only send pre-decoded keypress information (i.e. it would send you `A' rather than requiring you detect a shift key depression and a 'a' key depression followed by a release of each key), and since that time I don't know of many keyboard handlers (except those designed for piano keyboards) that send key-release information.

It should be possible to poll the keyboard to see which keys are currently down. If this is done regularly enough, then we could get the functionality I want above. How could action games like half-life work without such functionality? Anton.

There is surely no problem in principle, as piano keyboards prove, in detecting key movement. Indeed, some music keyboards even arrange to output `velocity' information so that you can detect how hard the keys were pressed. Of course, such keyboards often cost thousands of dollars. However, I don't know of _any_ PC keyboard that has a key-depress/strobe interface anymore. All of the ones I know of use a serial port, PS2 port or USB port to connect, and these interfaces generally deliver the decoded key, _not_ the pre-decode information. Some PC keyboards _do_ have an `autorepeat' feature that will cause the keyboard to send repeated copies of a character at some frequency when the key is held down, though. I don't play games on computers, so I can't answer the part of your question that refers to them.