Short answer: No. Here's what you can do to run LARCH.
If you have an Intel Mac:
1) Use Boot Camp (http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/publicbeta.html)
2) Use Parallels (http://www.parallels.com/)
3) Use Fusion (http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/fusion/)
4) Use CrossOver (http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/)
Although CrossOver does not officially support Authorware, I had no trouble installing and running LARCH on an Intel Mac without Windows using CrossOver. Everything looks fine except for animated movies. Page formatting is identical to Windows although individual characters are very slightly different from "true" Windows. It may be worth considering this option if you don't have other Windows needs. See the graphic enlargements in the sidebar.
If you have a PPC Mac (G3 or G4):
Use VPC (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx)
The Long answer: Here's why there won't be a Mac LARCH.
The long answer of why there won't be a Mac LARCH is a real downer for me because LARCH was made "on a Mac, by a Mac and for a Mac," starting in 1987 with a two-floppy Mac SE. What made it possible was a Mac-only program called Course of Action, a computer-assisted instruction authoring system that moved me from writing code like "br*+15, s1,1" to drawing interactively on the screen and dragging objects along animation paths. But Course of Action was renamed Authorware and the company merged to form Macromedia. Authorware was Mac authoring but added a Windows run-time packaging option. Then, it became "dual-authoring-platform," which was wonderful: I could do most of the work on Mac and tweak on Windows once the bulk of code was transferred. This was important as more and more schools changed from Mac to Windows in the late 90s.
Later, Authorware became a Windows-authoring system with a Mac-packager which didn't work very well and shortly seemed to drop support for the Macintosh altogether.
Several years later, they have the Mac Packager working again, but it still doesn't work very well. The same typeface displays differently on Mac from the way it does on Windows. Worse, the display options such as fade, dissolve, slide right, etc. are not the same: A fade-in timing of two seconds on Windows takes a full minute on Mac (I have no idea why). So, a Mac Package LARCH has many snags, principally text and page formatting, timing of animations and background transparency of animated "movies." For example, in "Survey: Polar: Azimuths & Bearings, screen 3 of 7, the azimuth angle "fans" to 45-degrees and a little "plan-view man" starts walking from A to B. On Windows this looks fine (the movie was created on a Mac SE, incidentally) but when saved from Windows to a Mac version, the timing of the fan's sweep is wrong and the "walking man" is surrounded by a white half-inch square area which moves along the path. This is really unacceptable and I have tried every trick in the book to set the movie background to transparent. Finally, I replaced the "walking-man" movie with a red dot sliding from A to B. The substitution works in that case, but not with the car skidding around the curve in the Superelevation module or the animated road rotation methods. (See sidebar.)
With roughly 90% of the first two modules, Survey and Roadway finished, some of it looks pretty good but there are other parts that just look BAD. I can't tweak and adjust on the Mac so I have to make changes on the Windows side, re-package and move the file to the Mac side, check the adjustment and if it isn't right, repeat the entire process. There are over 1400 displays that have to be checked and adjusted. There isn't a short cut and when it works, the Mac-Packager version STILL looks like Cinderella before the fairy godmother dropped in.
Compare the three enlargements of the simple animated movie at the right.
The bottom line is this: The "native" MacLARCH produced by Authorware's Mac Packager doesn't cut it. Boot Camp, Parallels and (probably) Fusion work perfectly because they ARE Windows XP running on an Intel Mac. CrossOver is NOT Windows and doesn't require purchase of Windows and does everything just like Windows XP except for the movie animations.
