任天堂は、API(詳しくはWikipedia等を参照)を正規の開発者に配布しており、which behind the scenes 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".
List of services:
List of PXI services: