@Creteloc

if there is no software from the manufacturer to change this (which i doubt for a cheap encoder like this), you might aswell give up, the microswitches you have, simply cannot physically handle what you want them to do.

however, if this is just a matter of the leds being too bright, you could just add some resistors to lower the brightness of the leds.

@Yornav No for Retroarch cores, as far as I know. Maybe for some version of advancemame, but I have not look at it. They will work if you compile the latest standard mame, but it will run very slowly on the Raspberry.

Sorted, finally found this thread which shows the exact way to wire them.
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/17420/led-arcade-button-power-supply/3

I was kind of giving up hope I would get my Howler working on my Pi3. Is there a retro pi image that I can download that will have everything set up? I'm really new to all of this, and I'm also dyslexic so the amount of reading I have to do is pretty daunting.

I'd love to find an image I can just put on my SD card and start going.

A little more searching and I found a great thread that describes this: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/17533/how-do-i-get-these-led-arcade-buttons-to-light-up

I'm using a Pac-Drive from Ultimarc for my LED buttons. @savetheclocktowr made a controller software for some nice sequencing effects. It's not needed for permanent lighting, the Pac-Drive will do that out-of-the-box in Retropie.