Keyboards

Hi, I decided that i''m not learning things in enough detail using directx or opengl, by letting them do all the work for me. So, i''ve begun work on what is eventually going to be a directx-like engine, using DJGPP, though its totally for a learning experience, so dont bite my head off for aiming too high . Anyway, things are going fine, i''ve just about finished the 2D side of it, but i just cant seem to figure out how to read input from the keyboard. I''ve read some articles, and i can scan for the state of the control keys, but for the normal keys i want to use a bool to represent each key in an array, which can be set up at the beginning of each frame, so i can just look at a certain bool to see if a certain key is pressed. So, what i''m asking is, does anyone know of any way to scan through each possible key on a keyboard to see if it''s pressed or not? Thanks for any help, Helicon56.