I'd argue that even before the "good science" really established itself broadly (that is, before the last few hundred years in Europe) there were the results that have all the rights to be called "good science" and Ptolemy's formulas actually have all the right to be recognized as "good science." Note, the formulas, not the models that people believed, the "firm spheres and stuff":
They made good prediction for where the planets are going to be. They covered all the known planets. They produced accurate results for all the observations of their time. It took the lifetime work of Brahe and his development of his own observatories to even collect enough data for Kepler to be able to recognize differences between the approximate circle paths of the planets.
In short, just like Newton's, Ptolemy's formulas are a "good enough" approximation when knowing their limits.
I've even read one scientist, and I tend to believe him, claiming that Ptolemy himself, during the development of his formulas, must have used the Sun-centric model, and then he produced the "projected" result which was more acceptable for everybody who just wanted to calculate where the planets are on the sky, as seen from the Earth.