Most efficient way to draw an array of pixels

Hello everybody, I’m new to PICO-8 and I would really appreciate your sugestions on how to achieve something I have in mind. No code is needed, just some ideas are appreciated.

So I have a particle system which spawn some moving pixels, that after some time/lifespan must remain persistent and static on screen on the last location they were seen. After that they don’t move nor change color at all and they have to stay there “forever”.

The first approach I tried is adding a static-particle to a table everytime a moving particle dies, and then traversing this table and drawing each of them using pset(), on every frame. I was wondering if you think there’s a more efficient method like, for example, writing directly into screen memory somehow? Or using an array in memory for the x and y values of the particles instead of a table? Something more efficient than doing pset inside a foor loop, considering that there might be several hundred or a couple of thousands of particles.

Like I said I’m new to PICO-8 but I love it since the first day I heard of it. I’m specially new to the memory manipulation part of it and would appreciate if you could share some tips or “tricks”.

Thanks everybody!