Brother color laser printers have emulation modes. I think they support Epson dot matrix or HP PCL. Of course you have to get the data to them somehow. Does your computer have USB?

Yes It has USB. Can I do it via networking ?? I have my Windows 98 PC connecting to my HP MediaSmart Server running Windows Home Server and I also use Protoweb.

Do you want to print from USB or network? For USB it's easy. Just select any HP color laserjet from the list which does PCL and it should work just fine. For network you need to first install something like "instlpr.exe" (use Google). Got it working on a HP LaserJet 200 colorMFP M276nw some time ago. Don't have the exact steps but shouldn't be to hard.

Easiest is to use something to print to PDF with tools like PrimoPDF and print those files on your more up to date pc btw. 😀

If you don't mind setting up a print server with CUPS on another machine then I'm pretty sure you can use any CUPS compatible color laser printer and get by with the Postscript drivers that shipped with 98.

Printer drivers supporting 98se without resorting to virtualization or networking dropped like a rock around ~2006

Funny part was I bought a new color printer with 3.1x drivers in 2005, odd how supporting old os’s suddenly wasn’t a thing about then.

Back in ye olde times trying to support a 98 business machine that needed photo realistic color output circa 2011 became a big pain of finding older printers that were reliable.

One of the first irritating cheapo single drum multi pass color lasers was said to work with 9x if you did driver hacking. I was never brave enough to waste bank on an undesirable printer just because it may have hackable 9x support.

Sort of miss the old days when they had drivers for even ancient equipment/software provided with new printers.

Usually, HP printers use PCL language, but...

The printer specifications says:

Print languages
Host-based (uses the processing power and resources of your computer to process the print job. No PCL or PostScript)

The link leads to the HP Color Laserjet 2600n spectifications (the version that has a network interface, the non-n printer is USB only). So it seems that you'll need proper drives for Windows 98... and HP only supports Windows 2000 or later. Maybe it is compatible and you could use drivers from previous "host-based" (funny term to avoid calling them GDI) printers, but I wouldn't risk.

If you absolutely need to print in this printer using Windows 98, you could set-up a linux machine that gets PS input and uses ghostscript and hplip to output something compatible with your printer...

Gotta wonder…

Good find.

https://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00318212.pdf

Looks like the driver package does support 98SE somewhat. There are instructions in this PDF.

I think you can use "any generic HP Color laserjet" driver with that printer, most are compatible with many brands, missing one or two features.
For example, you can use hp laserjet color driver on some models of color OKI brand

Btw, i have both Laserjet 2600 and 3600, they use expensive toners

Theoretically a PostScript printer should be compatible all the way back to the 80s when desktop publishing took off.

The printer comes with a PPD file to tell the PostScript generator the names of its paper trays, whether it supports duplexing, etc. If you can't find it elsewhere, it's probably included with the Windows driver or buried in one of the .CAB files inside.

I have had mixed results with trying to load the PPD file into ancient (eg Windows 3.1 PostScript driver) software. Sometimes it's better just to pick a period, preloaded color PostScript printer and just make the printer deal with it.

The simplest way to print to these is your computer connects to TCP port 9100 of the printer, sends PostScript, breaks the connection, and the printer prints. I've heard there is a JetDirect driver from HP you can install on Win9x to add support for that (2000/XP had it out of the box). There's also an Axis Print System you can try to do port 9100 or LPR printing. And finally you can go down the path of trying to get the printer to act as an SMB 1.x server, or have an intermediate SMB 1.x machine on your network (I'm using this to allow Win3.x to send PostScript that then gets fed into CUPS and goes to a modern color inkjet).

Be aware that there is a rebellion going on against all of this, starting from the mobile device community, called driverless printing. Many of its advocates don't seem to get that the whole idea was to keep it as PostScript all the way until it gets sent to the printer, so it's been "driverless" all along. The new driverless uses some restricted variant of PDF I believe, among other formats, but wants you to use Bonjour/Zeroconf and IPP (HTTP/HTTPS) to connect to the printer rather than the port 9100 trick. They consider PostScript and PPD files especially (because their only exposure to them is these pseudo-PPDs that CUPS produces for printers that are not actually PostScript printers) very deprecated.

I use the HP Standard Port Monitor for Win95/98 and the HP Color LaserJet PS built-in driver for printing to my networked CP2025dn. I don't really use it for printing, I mainly set it up just to see if it would work.