I reckon these official converters were instrumental in Tengen's work for reverse engineering the NES to run "unlicensed" games.
It turns out that another blog post on this site explains exactly that:
https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.ht...
"How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they could get away with it."
This has got to be the most Cobra Kai thing a company has ever done to another company for the benefit of consumers, and I love every bit of it.