Up to now, we've been using INPUT to get things from the keyboard. The problem with INPUT is that our program stops until the user presses the enter key. Wouldn't it be nice to keep the program running and still be able to get input from the keyboard? INKEY$ will let you do this. Using INKEY$ is very important if you want to make "real-time" game programs.

Let's fix the clock program to let the user press any key to stop the program. This way the user doesn't have to know about the Break key.

 CLS
 LOCATE 3, 1
 PRINT "Press any key to exit"
 DO
 LOCATE 1, 1
 PRINT TIME$
 SLEEP 1
 LOOP WHILE INKEY$ = ""

Not bad at all. Now we don't need to teach the user about the Break key. We can do the same thing in any of our other programs that need the Break key. If the user does not press a key, INKEY$ returns nothing or "".

This next program will sit in a loop getting keys from the keyboard with INKEY$ and printing them to the screen:

 CLS
 DO
 Key$ = INKEY$
 IF Key$ <> "" THEN
 PRINT Key$;
 END IF
 LOOP

That little program can be used to find the various secret codes used by INKEY$ to let you know the arrow keys have been pressed. This is very useful in game programming where the arrow keys might control a player in a game. If you press an arrow key, you'll see that a space and a letter are generated.