🚀 go-pugleaf

I would like to read characters one at a time from the keyboard type-
ahead buffer from a program written in C.  Microsoft C provides two 
functions: getch() and _bios_keybrd()

	if( ( bits9 = getch() ) == 0 ) bits9 = 0x0100 | getch() ;

	bits16 = _bios_keybrd( _NKEYBRD_READ ) ;

_bios_keybrd returns much more information for special keys and keys 
modified by multiple shifts, but both do a lot of translation.  I 
realize that I could write an interrupt handler to deal with each 
keystroke.  I could also try _bios_keybrd( _NKEYBRD_SHIFTSTATUS ) but
I would suppose that the result would not refer to old keystrokes 
already in the buffer.

My questions are:

1. What is actually stored in the buffer? (as reported by _bios_keybrd,
   or shift-state + scan-code)

2. Are there a well-known approaches to this problem?