there are plenty of threads here that talk about the obd readiness for 98 cars.

Yes there are quite a few. I contributed to one of them and posted both EPA and Appendix J docs.

It is not the readiness issue of the car but the readiness issue of the Smog centers and the STAR testing facilities.

Today we came across a facility that not only knew nothing about these issues of OBD readiness
but these certified people refused to follow the directions for checking MIL/CEL
then move on to tailpipe test.
They simply wanted to do the only thing they knew , which works great for a 2008 car, but not so much for 1996 to 1998.

You have to shop around looking for people that have been around enough to understand how to handle the cars on those lists.

Hence the post here, looking for intelligent, Mitsubishi friendly smog centers in Ventura
that are not going to get confused and ask you to keep driving for 500 miles more, and then act confused again when the OBD is not in readiness for their test.

In the last two years a sort of change happened where the test centers now insist that cars pass a handheld OBD scanner test before hooking up to machine.
In the future it has been proposed that OBD test will be the only test needed.

Our Mitsu cars will never pass the OBDII only test.

And providing this didn't help any?

http://www.epa.gov/otaq/regs/im/obd/regtech/420f08009.pdf