asynchronous keyboard input

[clax99]

Hi, Im writing a game applet in Java and for the first time its too slow receiving user input(arrow keys), through the KeyListener/KeyEvent paradigm. I instead want to use asynchronous keyboard querying, as is done with my games written for Windoze. Basically, every time through the main game loop, I want to query for the status of the 4 arrow keys, rather than responding to KeyEvent messages sent to another running thread solely employed for catching key events. I have no idea how to do this in Jave, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks