spikie, that's cool that you've taken it further.
I've never worked with EEPROM, but with regards to int vs char, you should be able to write a routine to put two chars into an int and then write the int array into EEPROM.
Something like this maybe? You may have to do type coercion to get this to work.
int twoCharsInOneInt = tmpMsg_*256 + tmpMsg[i+1];_
Don't forget to pad the char array if they're not divisible by two.
Good luck!