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 (grouped by the process which provides them):

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:app, am:net, am:u, am:sys, am:pipe
Yes Process Manager Services pm:app, pm:dbg
Yes NIM Services nim:aoc, nim:ndm, nim:s, nim:u
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 Camera Services cam:u, y2r:u, cam:s, cam:c, cam:q (New3DS only)
Yes Codec Services cdc:HID, cdc:MIC, cdc:CSN, cdc:DSP, cdc:LGY, cdc:CHK
Yes DLP Services dlp:CLNT, dlp:FKCL, dlp:SRVR
Yes DSP Services dsp::DSP
Yes GSP Services gsp::Lcd, gsp::Gpu
Yes BOSS Services boss:U
Yes CECD Services cecd:u, cecd:s
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:NFC, hid:QTM, hid:SPVR, hid:USER
Yes PTM Services ptm:gets, ptm:play, ptm:s, ptm:sets, ptm:sysm, ptm:u
Yes NWM Services nwm::UDS
Yes HTTP Services http:C
Yes SSL Services ssl:C
Yes Socket Services soc:P, soc:U
Yes AC Services ac:i, ac:u
Yes Friend Services frd:a, frd:u
Yes News Services
Yes PDN Services pdn:g
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
Yes ACT Services act:a, act:u
No NFC Services
No MVD Services
No QTM Services

List of PXI services:

List of ports:


See Error codes.