input without pause

I have a while loop that i want to keep going until the user presses enter, i have tried using
while (getch()!=13)
{
commands
}
and other variations, but every command i know pauses the loop and waits for the input. Is there a way to keep the loop going while also waiting for the input?
any help would be greatly appreciated.

the way I used to do it way back when I did games in the console was to use kbhit() which returns true if any key on the keyboard has been hit. Not sure if it's a standard function or not though, might have to look that up

Code:

---

int done=0;
 while(!done)
 {
        if(kbhit())
        {
                int keypress=getch();
                if(keypress==224)
                {
                        int subkeypress=getch();
 // Process arrow keys, f1-f12 keys, etc
                }
        }
 // Process the rest of the program here
 }

---

oh, there's also asynchronous key getting using this function:

GetAsyncKeyState

It might be best to pair it with this macro, unless you're against macro use.

Code:

---

  #define KEY_DOWN(vk_code)        ((GetAsyncKeyState((vk_code))&0x8000 ? 1:0))

---

and btw, you have to pass a VK_* code here, so you could do:
if(KEY_DOWN(VK_RETURN))
to test if the return/enter key has been pressed

(defined in windows.h)

sweet. thanx for that, works like a dream.