What you need depends on, well, what you need.
If you need to be able to accept more than button press simultaneously, then you pretty much need to have a separate I/O line going to each button. You can do this (for example) by using parallel-in serial-out shift register chips to measure the state of each button at a given moment. (Obviously you need well-defined polarity too-- each button connects to ground, and each input line on your PISO chip has a 10k pull-up resistor, for example.)
But, if you don't need multi-press capability, then what you want is a "switch matrix." This works just like an LED matrix, in a sense-- you set up rows and columns and scan them to see which buttons are pressed. Google might be able to help you find some good examples.
Windell H. Oskay
drwho(at)evilmadscientist.com
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/
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Evil Scientist
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Registered: 06/15/06 Posts: 1932
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