Nintendo provides application developers with an API, which communicate with certain services. Services, in this sense, are system processes running in the background which wait for incoming requests. When a process wants to communicate with a service, it first needs to get a handle to the named service, and then it can communicate with the service via interprocess communication. Each service has a name up to 8 characters, for example "nim:u".

Handles for services are retrieved from the service manager port, "srv:". Services are an abstraction of ports, they operate the same way except regular ports can have their handles retrieved directly from a SVC.

For a description of how commands and arguments are passed to services, see IPC Command Structure.

List of services:

Old3ds Services Service names Notes
Yes Filesystem servicesā€Ž fs:USER, fs:LDR, fs:REG
Yes Process Servicesā€Ž
Yes PXI Servicesā€Ž PxiFS0, PxiFS1, PxiFSB, PxiFSR, PxiPM, pxi:am9, pxi:dev, pxi:mc, pxi:ps9
Yes Application Manager Services am:net, am:u, am:sys, am:pipe
Yes Process Manager Services pm:app, pm:dbg
Yes NIM Services
Yes Config Services
Yes NS and APT Services ns:s, ns:p, ns:c, APT:A, APT:S, APT:U
Yes RO Services ldr:ro
Yes NDM Services
Yes CSND Services csnd:SND
Yes Codec Services cdc:HID, cdc:MIC, cdc:CSN, cdc:DSP, cdc:LGY, cdc:CHK
Yes DSP Services dsp:DSP
Yes GSP Services gsp::Lcd, gsp::Gpu
Yes IR Services
Yes I2C Services i2c::MCU, i2c::CAM, i2c::LCD, i2c::DEB, i2c::HID, i2c::IR, i2c::EEP
Yes GPIO Services gpio:CDC, gpio:MCU, gpio:HID, gpio:NWM, gpio:IR
Yes HID Services hid:USER, hid:SPVR
Yes PTM Services
Yes NWM Services
Yes HTTP Services
Yes SSL Services
Yes Socket Services
Yes AC Services
Yes Friend Services
Yes News Services
Yes PDN Services
Yes SPI Services
Yes Loader Services
Yes MCU Services mcu::CAM, mcu::GPU, mcu::HID, mcu::RTC, mcu::SND, mcu::NWM, mcu::HWC, mcu::PLS, mcu::CDC
Yes MIC Services mic:u
No NFC Services
No MVD Services
No QTM Services

List of PXI services:

List of ports:


See Error codes.