Immediately responding to keypresses?

I have looked in two different sources, Jasma's C++ bible and learning c++ in 21 days and I cant get an answer, though I read you can do ti with windows programming(I have yet to figure out how to construct a window and implement graphics or text...Im reading many tutorials about OpenGL.) Anyway, back to the question at hand. In a console application I am tired of having the user press 1 then hit enter for the program to register the requested action. Is there anyway I can make my program automatically return 1 when the user presses 1 without hitting enter? Thanks in advance for any help on this.

getch() or _getch()//not all compilers have it and does not echo output to screen

getche() or _getche()//again not all compilers have it and does echo output to screen