Super simple solar system. Left/right to adjust time, up/down to adjust zoom.
This is a port of an orrery I wrote in C++ back in 2003 or so. It was fun trying to cram it into the Pico-8, with its limited numeric precision.
Printing the date proved to be more of a challenge than just about anything else. I haven't tried to write the reverse function yet (year/month/day to Julian day number) so the cartridge just starts up somewhere near the beginning of the current year.
Not recommended to plan horoscopes or Mars missions with this thing, but compare it with https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ss_inner or https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ss_outer, which is where I got the orbital elements from.
Putting a Lambert solver in so you could plan Mars missions (despite what I just said) would be a fun next step.
Good stuff... I did a few orbital mechanics games in the past (one of them was my first Pico-8 project) but was always too lazy to use actual data about our solar system.
Could form the basis for a neat interplanetary game in "The Expanse" universe (I'm not going to do it though ;-)
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