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According to Iwata-San the N5 (Nintendo's codename for the next console) will be able to play GameCube games.

In an interview with Famitsu, the head of Nintendo Satoru Iwata has stated the N5 will have backwards compatibility.

"It will be able to use the games already created in the previous generation. And it is something that will work. Side performances and graphics, one reached today a kind of limit with a quality which is already close to realism and it will be difficult to still much better do. The role of Nintendo is thus to study other ways in order to improve the experience of the player."

News source: GameCube Europe

The fate of the deal is largely in the hands of government regulators in the United States and Europe, both of which are conducting antitrust investigations. Oracle said last week it has provided the Department of Justice with all the information asked for, and the company expects to hear back next month as to whether it will be allowed to proceed with its takeover attempt. The European review is expected to take longer.

Mergers and acquisitions attorney Hillard Sterling said he expects the deal to be approved, although the government may require Oracle to sell off certain business units or make other changes before the merger could go through.

"There's just no hard evidence that it would cause anti-competitive impact (that is) illegal under antitrust law," said Sterling, of the Chicago law firm Much Shelist.

But getting approved is far from the end of the battle.

Because PeopleSoft's management is against the buyout, it has refused to pull back the company's poison pill, a standard corporate defense that thwarts an unwanted takeover by flooding the market with new shares.

Oracle is fighting the poison pill in court. But in 2004, possibly even before it hears back from the Justice Department and the European Commission, Oracle plans to put forward a slate of alternative directors for PeopleSoft. If PeopleSoft shareholders want to be bought out by Oracle, they can vote for Oracle's directors, who would then fight from within PeopleSoft in favor of the buyout.

While all this goes on, the battle is also being waged on the financial front. Despite Conway's staunch opposition to the deal, a corporate buyout is in the end a matter to be decided by investors. If the $19.50 per share Oracle is offering starts to look good to PeopleSoft investors, they could pressure Conway and the rest of PeopleSoft's board of directors to drop the poison pill and take the buyout.

That means that PeopleSoft has to keep its share price high to ward off the takeover. PeopleSoft currently trades at $22.13, making Oracle's $19.50 offer look unattractive to investors. But a disappointing quarter of sales, or any other bad news, could cause PeopleSoft's share price to slip below Oracle's offer price.

PeopleSoft has been fighting this side of the battle by going all out to keep sales strong despite the shadow of the takeover. In an innovative but controversial move, the company in June started promising customers that if PeopleSoft were bought by a company that didn't keep improving and maintaining the software, the customers could get as much as five times their money back. Later, PeopleSoft expanded the program to include a wide range of events that would trigger the refund, such as the reduction of research and development spending on software updates.

Oracle has tried to discredit this program, suggesting that the unconventional contracts might get PeopleSoft in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Oracle and an independent group of shareholders have both sued to try to force PeopleSoft to drop the money-back offer.

The battle has been a spectacle rarely seen in Silicon Valley, because hostile takeovers are almost unheard of in technology.

And that's with good reason, said Gary Bloom, a former Oracle executive and now CEO of Veritas Software Corp. Bloom said he believes that the hostile nature of Oracle's bid is hurting its chances of getting regulatory approval.

"How much Justice Department review would it have gotten if PeopleSoft and Oracle were both telling positive stories? ... (With) Oracle saying how good it is for the customer, PeopleSoft saying how bad it is for the customer, that's a natural Department of Justice review," Bloom said in an interview.

PeopleSoft's hard-line reaction to Oracle's offer isn't the kind of behavior Silicon Valley leaders consider exemplary either. Conway told the press shortly after Oracle made its offer that "there is no condition that I can even remotely imagine where PeopleSoft would be sold to Oracle."

"It's not his choice to not sell at any price," Ellison retorted in an interview with The Chronicle. "It's the choice of the owners," he said, referring to the shareholders.

Other CEOs aren't as blunt, but they agree that the fate of a company is ultimately up to investors, not management.

"Our shareholders have to decide if our business plan (or a buyout) is most attractive to long-term shareholder value," said Alfred Chuang, chief executive of San Jose softwaremaker BEA Systems. "If I can't show that, I don't deserve to be an independent company."

The battle has had uglier moments. Conway has compared Ellison to Genghis Khan. Ellison joked in a presentation to analysts that Conway thought Ellison was going to shoot his dog, then shocked many by saying that if Ellison had only one bullet, "It wouldn't be for the dog."

But despite all the mudslinging, both CEOs have come through the year looking not too shabby, said Mitchell Kertzman, a venture capitalist with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

"Craig comes across looking tough, because he's held off a pretty big suitor," Kertzman said.

"On the Oracle side, they showed some professionalism and discipline that wasn't always in the profile of the company," said Kertzman, who once worked for the Oracle chief as CEO of an Ellison side project, Network Computer, which later became Liberate Technologies.

While many people saw Oracle's original bid as a devilish scheme dreamed up by Ellison to interfere with PeopleSoft's business, Kertzman said, "it looks now like Oracle was pretty serious about it."

Regardless of whether the merger actually goes through or gets tossed out like last year's wrapping paper, the software industry will never be the same, said Tad Piper, an analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. PeopleSoft is one of the investment bank's clients. Piper doesn't own shares in either firm.

"The bid, in addition to PeopleSoft's acquisition of J.D. Edwards, set the ball rolling on the mergers and acquisitions front," he said. Since June, smaller deals in the software industry have been closing every month.

"It also greatly changed people's view of what Oracle's strategy is," he said. Oracle used to be known as a company that didn't do big acquisitions. But no more.

"There are a lot of small software companies that had very fast strategy meetings" after Oracle's June tender offer, said Piper, "(saying) 'What do we do now if the space is going to change that dramatically? Do we want to be independent, or should we be looking for a dance partner?' "